LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




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500A'5 ^r MR. MABIE 



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MY STUDY FIRE 

MY STUDY FIRE, Second Series 

UNDER THE TREES AND ELSEWHERE 

SHORT STUDIES IN LITERATURE 

ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION 

ESSAYS ON NATURE AND CULTURE 

BOOKS AND CULTURE 

ESSAYS ON WORK AND CULTURE 

THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

NORSE STORIES 
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

FOREST OF ARDEN 
A CHILD OF NATURE 
WORKS AND DAYS 
PARABLES OF LIFE 




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CHARLES LOUIE.-HIHTOH'.-, 


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'• ro-niorrow the I'lo-^soms will begin to sitt down tium 
ttif snuwv branches " 

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HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE 







COFY 8. 



First edition published October, igoz 



UNIVERSITY PRESS • JOHN WILSON 
AND SON • CA.MBRlDGli. U.S.A. 





' *^'' TO MY ^;^ 

' FRIENDS IN ARDEN "'~" 

,^' C. B. Y. 

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 



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CHAPTER PAGE 

I. An April Day 12 

II. Under the Apple Boughs .... 20 

HI. Along the Road—I 27 

IV. Along the Road— II 34 

V. The Open Fields 42 

VI. Earth and Sky 50 

VII. The Mystery of Night ^8 

VIII. Off Shore 66 

IX. A Mountain Rivulet 74 

X. The Earliest Insights 81 

XI. The Heart of the Woods .... 90 

XII. Beside the River 101 

XIII. At the Spring 108 

XIV. On the Heights 114 

XV. Under College Elms 123 

XVI. A Summer Morning 132 

y\VII. A Summer Noon 139 

XVIII. Eventide 14^ 

XIX. The Turn of the Tide 1^2 

XX. A Memory of Summer 1^8 




LI5TOr- DRANX^ING5 

"To-morrow the blossoms will begin to sift 

down from the snowy branches "... Frontispiece 

" To-day I give you a glimpse of paradise " . . page 24 

"The Bacchic throng had passed that way and 
left their mood of wild and lawless frolic 
behind" "44 

" But who knows what shadows have sunk into 

these sunless depths?" "78 

" Have, on the instant, sprung to their coverts " . " 94 

"And strayed about noiselessly with subdued and 

lovely mien" " 140 




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place of late ; even the 
open fire, which still lin- 
gers on the hearth, has 
failed to exorcise a cer- 
tain gray and weary spirit 
which has somehow taken possession of the 
premises. As I was thinking this morning 
about the best way of ejecting this unwel- 
come inmate, it suddenly occurred to me 
that for some time past my study has been 
simply a workshop ; the fire has been lighted 
early and burned late, the windows have 
been closed to keep out all disturbing 
sounds, and the pile of manuscript on the 
table has steadily grown higher and higher. 
" After all," I said to myself, " it is I that 
ought to be ejected." Acting on this con- 
clusion, and without waiting for the service 
of process of formal dislodgment, 1 have let 
the fire go out, opened the windows, locked 
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the door, and put myself into the hands of 
my old friend, Nature, for refreshment and 
society. 1 find that 1 have come a little 
prematurely, although my welcome has 
been even warmer than it would have 
been later. 

" This is what 1 like," my old friend 
seemed to say. " You have not waited 
until I have set my house in order and 
embellished my grounds. You have come 
because you love me even more than my 
surroundings. I have a good many friends 
who know me only from May to October : 
the rest of the year they give me cold 
glances of surprised recognition, or they 
pass me by without so much as a look. 
Their ardent devotion in summer tills me 
with a deep disdain ; their admiration for 
great masses of colour, for high, striking 
elTects, and for the general lavishness and 
prodigality of my passing mood, betrays 
their lack of discernment, their defect of 
taste, and their slight acquaintance with 
myself. 1 should much prefer that they 
would leave my woods and fields untrod- 
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den, and not disturb my mountain solitudes 
with their ignorant and vulgar raptures. 
The people who really know me and love 
me seek me oftener at other seasons, when 
I am more at leisure, and can bid them 
to a more intimate companionship. They 
come to understand my finer moods and 
deeper secrets of beauty ; the elusive loveli- 
ness which 1 leave behind me to lure on my 
true friends through the late autumn, they 
find and follow with the eye and heart of 
love ; the rare and splendid aspects in which 
I often discover my presence in midwinter 
they enjoy all the more because I have with- 
drawn myself from the gaze of the crowd ; 
and the first faint touches of colour and 
soft breathings of life, which announce 
my return in the early spring, they greet 
with the deep joy of true lovers. Those 
only who discern the beauty of branches 
from which I have stripped the leaves to 
uncover their exquisite outline and sym- 
metry, who can look over bare fields and 
into the faded copse and find there the 
elusive beauty which hides in soft tones 
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and low colours, are my true friends ; all 
others are either pretenders or distant 
acquaintances." 

I was not at all surprised to hear my 
old friend express sentiments so utterly 
at variance with those held by many peo- 
ple who lay claim to her friendship ; in 
fact, they are sentiments which I find 
every year becoming more and more my 
own convictions. In every gallery of 
paintings you will find the untrained 
about the pictures on which the artist 
has lavished the highest colours from his 
palette ; those whose taste for art has had 
direction and culture will look for very 
different effects in the works which attract 
them. It is among the rich and varied 
low colours of this season, in wood and 
tield, that a true lover of Nature detects 
some of her rarest touches of loveliness; 
the low western sun, falling athwart the 
bare boughs and striking a kind of sub- 
dued bloom into the brown hill-tops and 
across the furze and heather, sometimes 
reveals a hidden charm in the landscape 
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which one seeks in vain when skies are 
softer and the green roof has been stretched 
■ ^ over the woodland ways. In fact, one can 

hardly lay claim to any intimacy with 
.^ Nature until he loves her best when she 

discards her royalty, and, like Cinderella, 
'■ • clad only in the cast-off garments of sun- 

nier days, she crouches before the ashes of 
"^ the faded year. The test of friendship is 

*""• its fidelity when every charm of fortune 

and environment has been swept away, 
'* — . - and the bare, undraped character alone 
"j'^-$' ,.'?'^ remains ; if love still holds steadfast, and 
•s' '"•" '.'iv-/ the joy of companionship survives in such 
'S^;^' an hour, the fellowship becomes a beautiful 
prophecy of immortality. To all profes- 
sions of love Nature applies this infallible 
test with a kind of divine impartiality. 
With the first note of the bluebird, under 
the brief flush of an April sky, her alluring 
invitation goes forth to the world ; day by 
day she deepens the blue of her summer 
skies and fills them with those buoyant 
clouds that float like dreams across the 
vision of the waking day ; night after 
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night she touches the stars with a softer 
radiance, and breathes upon her roses so 
that they are eager for the dawn, that 
they may lay their hearts open to her 
gaze ; the forests take on more and more 
the lavish mood of the summer, until 
they have buried their great trunks in 
perpetual shade. The splendid pageant 
moves on, gathering its votaries as it 
passes from one marvellous change to an- 
other ; and yet the Mistress of the Revels is 
nowhere visible. The crowds press from 
point to point, peering into the depths of 
the woods and watching stealthily where the 
torrent breaks from its dungeon in the hills, 
and leaps, mad with joy, in the new-found 
liberty of light and motion ; but not a 
flutter of her garment betrays to the keen- 
est eye the Presence which is the soul of all 
this visible, moving scene. 

And now there is a subtle change in the 
air ; premonitions of death begin to thrust 
themselves in the midst of the revelry ; 
there is a brief hush, a sudden glow of 
splendour, and lo ! the pageant is seemingly 
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at an end. The crowd linger a little, gather 
a few faded leaves, and depart ; a few — a 
very few — wait. Now that the throngs 
have vanished and the revelry is over, they 
are conscious of a deep, pervading quie- 
tude ; these are days when something touches 
them with a sense of near and sacred fellow- 
ship ; Nature has cast aside her gifts, and 
given herself. For there is a something 
behind the glory of summer, and they only 
have entered into real communion with 
Nature who have learned to separate her 
from all her miracles of power and beauty ; 
who have come to understand that she 
lives apart from the singing of birds, the 
blossoming of tlowers, and the waving of 
branches heavy with leaves. 

The Greeks saw some things clearly 
without seeing them deeply; they inter- 
preted through a beautiful mythology all 
the external phenomena of Nature. The 
people of the farther East, on the other 
hand, saw more obscurely, but far more 
deeply; they looked less at the visible 
things which Nature held out to them, 
18 










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and more into the mysteries of her hidden 
:' processes, her silent but universal muta- 
V tions; the subtle vanishings and reappear- 

^'^""k"'''"l'if '"^^^'' ^^^ presence; they seemed to hear 
•i^v^^tffl'vil'i *^^ ^^^^^^^y ^^^"^ °" whi'^h the seasons 
'Mm:^: ^^^ woven, to feel through some prim- 
itive but forgotten kinship the throes of 
the birth-hour, the vigils of suffering, and 
the agonies of death. Was there not in 
such an attitude toward Nature a hint of 
[}| the only real fellowship with her? 



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Chapter II 

UNDER THE APPLE BOUGHS 

weeks past I have 
been conscious of 
some mystery in the 
air ; there have been fleeting 
signs of secret communication 
between earth and sky, as if the 
hidden powers • were in friendly 
league and some great concerted movement 
were on foot. There have been soft lights 
playing upon the tender grass on the lawn, 
and caressing those delicate hues through 
which each individual tree and shrub searches 
for its summer foliage ; the mornings have 
slipped so quietly in through the eastern 
gates, and the afternoons have vanished so 
softly across the western hills, that one 
could not but suspect a plot to avert atten- 
tion and lull watchful eyes into negligence 
while all things were made ready for the 
moment of revelation. At times a subdued 
light has filled the broad arch of heaven, 
20 





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and, hiter, a fringe of rain has moved gently 
across the low hills and fallow tields, rip- 
pling like a wave from that upper sea 
which hangs invisible in golden weather, 
but becomes portentous and vast as the 
nether seas when the clouds gather and the 
celestial watercourses are unlocked. One 
day I thought I saw signs of a falling out 
between the conspirators, and I set myself 
to watch for some disclosure which might 
escape from one side or the other in the 
frankness of anger. The earth was sullen 
and overcast, the sky dark and forbidding, 
the clouds rolled together and grew black, 
and the shadows deepened upon the grass. 
At last there was a vivid flash of lightning, 
a crash of thunder, and the sudden roar of 
rain. " Now," I said to myself, " 1 shall 
learn what all this secrecy has been about." 
But I was doomed to disappointment ; after 
a few minutes of angry expostulation the 
sky suddenly uncovered itself, the clouds 
piled themselves against the horizon and 
disclosed their silver linings, and over the 
whole earth there spread a broad smile, as 

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if the hypocritical performance had been 
part of the original deception. 1 am con- 
fident now that it was, for that brief drench- 
ing of trees and sward was almost the last 
noticeable preparation before the curtain 
rose. The next day there was a deep, 
unbroken quiet across our piece of world, 
as if a fragment of eternity had been 
quietly slipped into the place of one of 
our brief, noisy days. The trees stood 
motionless, as if awaiting some signal, and 
1 listened in vain for tiiat inarticulate and 
half-heard murmur of coming life which, 
day and night, had filled my thoughts 
these past weeks, and set the march of the 
hours to a sublime rhythm. 

The next morning a faint perfume stole 
into my room. I rose hastily, ran to the 
window, and lo ! the secret was out : the 
apple trees were in bloom ! Three days 
later, and the miracle so long in preparation 
was accomplished ; the slowly rising tide 
of life had broken into a foam of blossoms 
and buried the world in a billowy sea. 
There will come days of greater splendour 
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than this, days of deeper foliage, of waving 
grain and ripening fruit, but no later day 
will eclipse this vision of paradise which lies 
outspread from my window ; life touches 
to-day the zenith of its earliest and freshest 
bloom ; to-morrow the blcssoms will begin 
to sift down from the snowy branches, 
and the great movement of summer will 
advance again ; but for one brief day the 
year pauses and waits, reluctant to break 
the spell of this perfect hour, to mar by the 
stir of a single leaf the stainless loveliness 
of this revelation of Nature's unwasted 
youth. 

I do not care to look through these great 
masses of bloom ; it is enough simply to live 
in an hour which brings such an overflow 
of beauty from the ancient fountains ; but 
Nature herself lures one to deeper thoughts, 
and, through the vision which spreads like 
a mirage over the landscape, hints at some 
hidden loveliness at the root of this riotous 
blossoming, some diviner vision for the eye 
of the spirit alone. " Look," she seems 
to say, as I stand and gaze with unappeased 
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hunger of soul, " this is my holiday. In 
the coming weeks 1 have a whole race to 
feed, and over the lengtii of the world men 
are imploring my help. They do their 
little share of work, and while they wait, 
waking and sleeping, anxiously watching 
winds and clouds, 1 vitalise their toil and 
turn all my forces to their bidding. The 
labour of the }ear is at hand and on its 
threshold 1 take this holiday. To-day 
give you a glimpse of paradise ; a garden 
in which all manner of loveliness blooms 
simply from the overflow of life, without 
thought, or care, or toil. This was my 
life before men came with their cries of 
hunger and nakedness ; this shall be my 
life again when they have passed beyond. 
This which lies before you like a dream 
is a glimpse of life as it is in me, and shall 
be in you ; immortal, inexhaustible fulness 
of power and beauty, overflowing in frolic 
loveliness. This shall be to you a day out 
of eternity, a moment out of the immortal 
youth to which all true life comes at last, 
and in which it abides." 
24 





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I cannot say that I heard these words, and 
yet tliey were as real to me as if they had 
been audible ; in all fellowship with Nature 
silence is deeper and more real than speech. 
As I stood meditating on these deep things 
that lie at the bottom of this sea of bloom, 
I understood why men in all ages have con- 
nected the flowering of the apple with their 
dreams of paradise ; I saw at a glance the 
immortal symbolism of these blossoming 
tields and hillsides. I did not need to lift 
my eyes to look upon that garden of Hes- 
perides, lying like a dream of heaven under 
the golden western skies, whence Heracles 
brought back the fruit of Juno ; I asked no 
aid of Milton's imagination to see the mighty 
hero in 

. . . the ^u;ardens fair 

Of Hesperus and his daugiiters three, 

Tliat sing- about the golden tree; 

and as I gazed, the vision of that other and 
nobler hero came before me, whose purity 
is more to us than his prowess, and who 
waits in Avilion, the '• Isle of Apples," for 
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Chapter III 

ALONG THE ROAD 
1 




\X^ - INCE I turned the key 



on my study I have 
almost forgotten the 
J ,1 familiar titles on 
r , J^^' /I which my eye rested 
^^f^j£:r whenever 1 took a 
survey of my book-shelves. Those 
friends stanch and true, with whom 1 have 
held such royal fellowship when skies were 
chill and winds were cold, will not forget 
me, nor shall I become unfaithful to them. 
1 have gone abroad that I may return later 
with renewed zest and deeper insight to my 
old companionships. Books and nature are 
never inimical ; they mutually speak for and 
interpret each other; and only he who 
stands where their double light falls sees 
things in true perspective and in right 
relations. 

The road along whose winding course I 
have been making a delightful pilgrimage 
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to-day has the double charm of natural 
beauty and of human association ; it is old, 
as age is reckoned in this new world ; it has 
grown hard under the tread of sleeping 
generations, and the great figures of history 
have passed over it in their journeys be- 
tween the two great cities which mark its 
limits. In the earlier days it was the king's 
highway, and along its up-hill and down- 
dale course the battalions of royal troops 
marched and countermarched to the call 
of bugles that have gone silent these hun- 
dred years and more. It is a road of varied 
fortunes, like many of those who have 
passed over it; it is sometimes rich in all 
manner of priceless possessions, and again 
it is barren, poverty-stricken, and desolate. 
It climbs long hills, sometimes in a round- 
about, hesitating, half-hearted way, and 
sometimes with an abrupt and breathless 
ascent ; at the summit it seems to pause a 
moment as if to invite the traveller to 
survey the splendid domain which it com- 
mands. On one side, in such a restful 
moment, one sees the wide circle of waters, 
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stretching- far otY to a horizon which rests 
on clusters of islands and marks the limits 
of the world ; in the foreground, and swee^> 
ing around the other points of the com- 
pass, a landscape rich in foliage, full of 
gentle undulations, and dotted here and 
there with fallow fields, spreads itself like 
another sea that has been hushed into 
sudden immutability, and then sown, every 
wave and swell of it, with the seeds of 
exhaustless fertility. 

From such points of eminence as these 
the road sometimes runs with hurried de- 
scent, as if longing for solitude, into the 
heart of the woodlands, and there winds 
slowly and solemnly under the overshadow- 
ing branches ; there are no fences here, and 
the sharp lines of separation between road- 
bed and forest were long ago erased in 
that quiet usurpation of man's work, which 
Nature never fails to make the moment she 
is left to herself. The ancient spell of the 
woods is unbroken in this leafy solitude, 
and no traveller in whom imagination sur- 
vives can hope to escape it. The deep 
29 















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breathings of primeval life are almost audi- 
ble, and one feels in a quick and subtle 
perception the long" past which unites him 
with the earliest generations and the most 
remote ages. 

Passing out from this brief worship under 
the arches of the most venerable roof in 
Christendom, the road takes on a frolic 
mood and courts the open meadows and 
the flooding sunshine ; green, sweet, and 
strewn with wild flowers, the open fields 
call one from either side, and arrest one's 
feet at every turn with solicitations to 
freedom and joyousness. The white clouds 
in the blue sky and the long sweep of these 
radiant meadows conspire together to per- 
suade one that time has strayed back to its 
happy childhood again, and that nothing 
remains of the old activities but play in 
these immortal fields. Here the carpet is 
spread over which one runs with childish 
heedlessness, courting the disaster which 
brings him back to the breast of the old 
mother, and makes him feel once more 
the warmth and sweetness out of which all 
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strength and beauty spring. A little brook 
crosses the road under a rattling bridge, and 
wanders on across the tlelds, limpid and 
rippling, running its little strain of music 
through the silence of the meadows. Its 
voice is the only sound which breaks the 
stillness, and that itself seems part of the 
solitude. By day the clouds marshal their 
shadows on it, and when night comes the 
heavens sow it with stars, until it flows like 
a dissolving belt of sky through the fragrant 
darkness. Sometimes, as I have come this 
way after nightfall, I have heard its call 
across the invisible fields, and in the sound 
I have heard 1 know not what of deep and 
joyous mystery ; the long- past and the far- 
olf future whispering together, under cover 
of the night, of those things which the stars 
remember from their youth, and to which 
they look forward in some remote cycle of 
their shining. 

Past old and well-worked farms, into 

which the toil and thrift of generations 

have gone, the old road leads me, and 

brings my thoughts back from elemental 

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forces and primeval ages to these later cen- 
turies in which human life has overlaid 
these hills and vales with rich memories. 
Wherever man goes Nature makes room 
for him, as if prepared for his coming, and 
ready to put her mighty shoulder to the 
wheel of his prosperity. The old fences, 
often decayed and fallen, are not spurned ; 
the movement of universal life does not 
flow past them and leave them to rot in 
their ugliness ; year by year time stains 
them into harmony with the rocks, and 
every summer a wave out of the great sea 
of life flings itself over them, and leaves 
behind some slight and seemly garniture 
of moss and vine. The old farm-houses 
have grown into the landscape, and the 
hurrying road widens its course, and some- 
times makes a long detour, that it may 
unite these outlying folk with the great 
world. There stands the old school-house, 
sacred to every traveller who has learned 
that childhood is both a memory and a 
prophecy of heaven. One pauses here, 
and hears, in the unbroken stillness, the 
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rush of feet that have never grown weary 
with travel, and the clamour of voices 
through which immortal youth still shouts 
to the kindred hills and skies, into those 
windows Nature throws all manner of in- 
vitations, and through them she gets only 
glances of recognition and longing. There 
are the fields, the woods, and the hills in 
one perpetual rivalry of charm; the bird 
sings in the bough over the window, and 
on still afternoons the brook calls and calls 
again. Here one feels anew the eternal 
friendship between childhood and Nature, 
and remembers that they only can abide 
in that fellowship who carry into riper 
years the self-forgetfulness, the sweet un- 
consciousness, the open mind and heart of 
a child. 



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Chapter IV 

ALONG THE ROAD 

II 

P^. HAVE found that walk- 
<'■ ing" stimulates observa- 
^^ tion and opens one's 
'(W eyes to movements and 
appearances in earth and 
sky, which ordinarily es- 
cape attention. The constant change of 
landscape which attends even the slow 
progress of a loitering gait puts one on 
the alert for discoveries of all kinds, and 
prompts one to suspect every leafy covert 
and to peer into every wooded recess with 
the expectation of surprising Nature as 
Actason surprised Diana — in the moment 
of uncovered loveliness. On the other 
hand, when one lounges by the hour in 
the depths of the forest, or sits, book in 
hand, under the knotted and familiar apple 
tree, on a summer afternoon, the faculty 
of observation is lulled into a dreamless 
34 



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sleep; one ceases to he far enough away 
from Nature to observe her ; one becomes 
part of the great, silent movements in the 
midst of which he sits, mute and motion- 
less, while the hours slip by with the peace 
of eternity already upon them. 

When I reached the end of my walk, 
and paused for a moment before retracing 
my steps, I was conscious of the inexhausti- 
ble richness of the world through which 
I had come ; a thousand voices had spoken 
to me, and a thousand sights of wonder 
moved before me; I was awake to the 
universe which most of us see only in 
broken and unintelligent dreams. Through 
all this realm of truth and poetry men have 
passed and repassed these many years, I 
said to myself; and I began to wonder 
how many of those now long asleep really 
saw or heard this great glad world of sun 
and summer! I began slowly to retrace 
my steps, and as I reached the summit of 
the hill and looked beyond I saw the cattle 
standing knee-deep in the brook that loiters 
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bleating of sheep borne from a distant 
pasturage. 

These familiar sights and sounds touched 
y}) me with a sudden pathos ; there is nothing 
in human associations so venerable, so 
familiar, as the lowing of the home-coming 
kine and the bleating of the flocks. They 
carry one back to the first homes and the 
most ancient families. Older than history, 
more ancient than civilisation, are these 
familiar tones which unite the low-lying 
meadows and the upland pastures with the 
fire on the hearthstone and the nightly care 
of the fold. When the shadows deepen 
over the country-side, the oldest memories 
are revived and the oldest habits recalled by 
the scenes about the farm-house. The same 
offices fall to the husbandman, the same 
sights reveal themselves to the housewife, 
the same sounds, mellow with the resonance 
of uncounted centuries, greet the ears of the 
children as in the most primitive ages. 

The highway itself stands as a memorial 
of the most venerable customs and the most 
ancient races. As 1 lift my eyes from its 
36 



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beaten road-bed, and look out upon it 
through the imagination, it escapes all later 
boundaries and runs back through history 
to the very dawn of civilisation ; it marks 
the earliest contact of men with a world 
which was wrapped in mystery. The hour 
that saw a second home built by human 
hands heard the first footfall on the first 
highway. That narrow footpath led to 
civilisation, and has broadened into the 
highway because human fellowships and 
needs have multiplied and directed the count- 
less feet that have beaten it into permanency. 
Every new highway has been a new bond 
between Nature and men, a new evidence 
of that indissoluble fellowship into which 
they are forever united. 

I have sometimes tried to recall in im- 
agination the world of Nature before a 
human voice had broken the silence or 
a human foot left its impress on the soil ; 
but when I remember that what 1 see in 
this sweep of force and beauty is largely 
what 1 myself put into the vision, that 
Nature without the human ear is soundless, 
37 



V 



^ 



m 



<y 






and without the human eye colourless, I 
understand that what lies spread before me 
never was until a human soul confronted 
it and became its interpreter. This radiant 
world upon which I look was without form 
and void until the earliest man brought to 
the vision of it that creative power within 
himself which touched it with form and 
colour and relations not its own. Nature 
is as incomplete and helpless without man 
as man would be without Nature. He 
brought her varied and inexhaustible beauty, 
and clothed her with a garment woven on 
we know not what looms of divine energy ; 
and she fed, sheltered, and strengthened 
him for the life which lay before him. To- 
gether they have wrought from the first 
hour, and civilisation, with all the circle 
of its arts, is their joint handiwork. 

In the atmosphere of our rich modern 
fellowship with Nature, the unwritten poetry 
to which every open heart falls heir, we 
forget our earliest dependence on the great 
mother and the lessons she taught when 
men gathered about her knee in the child- 
38 








w 






\ 



\\ 



M' 



:m. s;s^imfmm-^^^''''""'-m 



hood of the world. Not a spade turned 
the soil, not an axe felled a tree, not a path 
was made through the forest, that did not 
leave, in the man whose arm put forth the 
toil, some moral quality. In the obstacles 
which she placed in their pathway, in the 
difliculties with which she surrounded their 
life, the wise mother taught her children 
all the lessons which were to make them 
great. It was no easy familiarity which 
she offered them, no careless bestowal of 
bounty upon dependents ; she met them as 
men, and olTered them a perpetual alliance 
upon such terms as great and equal sover- 
eigns proffer and accept. She gave much, 
but she asked even more than she offered, 
and in the first moment of intercourse she 
struck in men that lofty note of sovereignty 
which has never ceased to thrill the race 
with mysterious tones of power and proph- 
ecy. Men have stood erect and fearless 
in the presence of the most awful revela- 
tions of the forces of Nature, affirming by 
their very attitude a supremacy of spirit 
which no preponderance of power can over- 
39 











All 






^v 

M 







» . ■.' < 



' .■■ Jc^;- 




shadow. Face to face through all his his- 
tory man has stood with Nature, and to 
each generation she lias opened some new 
page of her inexhaustible story. Begin- 
ning in the hardest toil for the most ma- 
terial rewards, this fellowship has steadily 
added one province of knowledge and in- 
timacy after another, until it has become 
inclusive of the most delicate and hidden 
recesses of character as well as those which 
are obvious and primary. In response to 
spirits which have continually come into a 
closer contact with her life. Nature has added 
to her gifts of food and wine, poetry and 
art, far-reaching sciences, occult wisdoms 
and skills ; she has invited the greatest to 
become her ministers, and has rewarded 
their unselfish service by sharing with them 
the mighty forces that sleep and awake 
at her bidding ; one after another the poets 
of truest gift have forsaken the beaten 
paths of cities and men, and found along 
her untrodden ways the vision that never 
fades ; her voice, now that men begin to 
understand it again as their forefathers 
40 



L.^' 




-St 





^^^^ 






m^,^ 



9'^ 



'ii 



^M^'^-' 



understood it, is a voice of worship. So, 
from their tirst work for food and shelter, 
men have steadily won from Nature gifts 
of insight and knowledge and prophecy, 
until now the mightiest secrets are whis- 
pered by the trees to him who listens, and 
the winds sometimes take up the burden of 
prophecy and sing- of a fellowship in which 
all truth shall be a common possession. 

As I walk along the old highway, the 
deepening- shadows touch the familiar land- 
scape with mystery ; one landmark after 
another vanishes until the lights in the 
scattered farm-houses gleam like reflected 
constellations. A deep silence tills the great 
heavens and broods over the wide earth ; 
all things have become dim and strange ; 
and yet I feel no loneliness in the midst of 
this star-lit solitude. The heavens shining 
over me, and the scattered household tires 
declare to me that fellowship of light in 
which Nature holds out her hand to man 
and leads him, step by step, to the un- 
speakable splendours of her central sun. 



41 




<? 







Chapter V 

THE OPEN FIELDS 

f^NE of the sights up- 
on which my eyes 
rest oftenest and 
with deepest con- 
tent is a broad 
sweep of meadow slowly climbing the 
western sky until it pauses at the edge of 
a noble piece of woodland. It is a play- 
ground of wind and tlowers and waving 
grasses. There are, indeed, days when it 
lies cold and sad under inhospitable skies, 
but for the most part the heavens are in 
league with cloud and sun to protect its 
charm against all comers. When the turf 
is fresh, all the promise of summer is in its 
tender green ; a little later, and it is sown 
thick with daisies and buttercups; and as 
the breeze plays upon it these frolicsome 
flowers, which have known no human 
tending, seem to chase each other in end- 
less races over the whole expanse. I have 
42 











'■:>! 



seen tliem run breathlessly up the long- 
slope, and then suddenly turn and rush 
pell-mell down again. If the wind had 
only stopped for a moment its endless 
gossip with the leaves, 1 am sure I should 
have heard the gleeful siiouts, the sportive 
cries, of these vagrant flowers whose spell 
is rewoven over every generation of chil- 
dren, and whose unstudied beauty and joy 
recall, with every summer, some of the 
clews which most of us have lost in our 
journey through life. Even as 1 write, 1 
see the white and yellow heads tossing to 
and fro in a mood of free and buoyant 
being, which has for me, face to face with 
the problems of living, an unspeakable 
pathos. 

What a depth of tender colour tills the 
arch of heaven as its bends over this play- 
ground of the blooming and beauty -laden 
forces of Nature ! The great summer 
clouds, shaping their courses to invisible 
harbours across the trackless aerial sea, 
love to drop anchor here and slowly trail 
their mighty shadows, vainly groping for 
43 






r 





i^^«:v- 




i& 



something- that shall make them fast. The 
winds, that have come roaring- through the 
woodlands, subdue their harsh voices and 
linger long in their journey across this 
sunny expanse. It is true, they sing: no 
lullabies as in the hollow under the hill 
where they themselves often fall asleep, 
but the music to which they move has a 
magical cadence of joy in it, and sets our 
thought to the dancing mood of the 
flowers. 

Sometimes, on quiet afternoons, when the 
great world of work has somehow seemed 
to drop its burdens into space, and carries 
nothing but rest and quietude along its 
journey under the summer sky, 1 have seen 
a pageant in the open fields that has made 
me doubt whether a dream had not taken 
me unawares. I have seen the first sweet 
flowers of spring rise softly out of the grass 
where they had been hiding and call gently 
to each other, as if afraid that a single loud 
word would dissolve the charm of sun and 
warm breeze for which they had waited 
After their dreamless sleep of 
44 



so long 




.''^jt.s' 



»l8f 




!'■. x'Ay-i HI- 






Dijiatifiiinui. 



A^i 



lijc tliKjiiM, liad passed that way and lett their iiiuod ot wih 
and lawless frolic hehind." 





""^. 



rvf?^,. 



'M 



^ 



"^^ 



^^Wll 



\'ji^m'rrirQA^^^^^^.^z.. M^^'^W!'^^^ 



montlis, these beauUriil chiklieii ol Mother 
Earth seemed almost atiaiil to break tlie 
stiUness from which they had come, and 
strayed about noiselessly, with subdued and 
lovely mien, exhalint;" a perfume as delicate 
as themselves. Then, witi: a rush and 
shout, the summer flowers suddenly burst 
upon the scene, overflowing" with life and 
merriment ; in lawless troops they ran 
hither and thither, tlinging echoes of their 
laughter over the whole country-side, and 
soon overshadowing entirely their older 
and more sensitive fellows ; these, indeed, 
soon vanish altogether, as if lonely and 
out of place under the broad glare and 
high colours of midsummer. And now 
for weeks together the game went on 
without pause or break ; the revelry grew 
fast and furious, until one suspected that 
some night the Bacchic throng had passed 
that way and left tiieir mood of wild and 
lawless frolic behind. 

At last a softer aspect spread itself over 

the glowing sky and earth. The nights 

grew vocal with the invisible chorus of 

45 







'"'•' <^;il'i TV. •«,!,. <Vy,/, .i/'jVW,s,>f . 




';1^ 



•l:^ 
t 



ii 



^\ 



\> 






t 



m 




m 



i 



insect life ; there was a mellow splendour 
in the nioonliiiht, which touched the dis- 
tant hills and wide-spreading- waters with a 
pathetic prophecy ot change. And now, 
ripe, serene, and rich with the accumu- 
lated beauty of the summer, the autumn 
flowers appeared. Their movement was 
like the stately dances of olden times ; 
youth and its overflow were gone forever ; 
but in the hour of maturity there remained 
a noble beauty, which touched all imagina- 
tions and communicated to all visible things 
a splendour of which the most radiant hours 
of early summer had been only faintly pro- 
phetic, in the calm of these golden days 
the autumn (lowers reigned with a more 
than regal state, and when the tirst cold 
breath of winter touched them, they fell 
from their great estate silently and royally 
as if their fate were matched to their rank. 
And now the fields were bare once more. 
From such a dream as this I often awake 
joyfully to tind the drama still in its tirst 
act, and to feel still before me the ever- 
deepening interest and ever-widening beauty 
46 



m 



mi^¥ 



;/-,^i^ 



m. 



^N! 



(\l: 




IH^ 



of the niinicle play to which Nature annu- 
ally bids us welcome. Across this noble 
play i; round, with its sweep of landscape 
and its arch of sky, I often wander with 
no companions but the tlowers, and with 
no desire for other fellowship. Here, as 
in more secluded and quiet places, Nature 
conlides to those who love her some deep 
and precious truths never to be put into 
words, but ever after to rise at times over 
the horizon of thought like vagrant ships 
that come and go against the distant sea 
line, or like clouds that pass along the 
remotest circle of the sky as it sleeps upon 
the hills. The essence of play is the uncon- 
scious overflow of life that seeks escape 
in perfect self-forgetfulness. There is no 
elTort in it, no whip of the will driving the 
unwilling energies to an activity from which 
they shrink ; one plays as the bird sings and 
the brook runs and the sun shines — not 
with conscious purpose, but from the simple 
overflow. In this sense Nature never works, 
she is always at play, in perfect uncon- 
sciousness, without friction or effort, her 



't 




I//'/-'"' 



47 



'ii 



I'd , 



l/l 



^,.//f^' 




{^iil 






"-x^. 




mightiest movements are made and her 
subhmest tasks accomplished. Throughout 
the whole range of her activity one never 
comes upon any trace of effort, any sign 
of weariness ; one is always impressed — as 
Ruskin said long ago of works of genius — 
that he is standing in the presence, not of a 
great etfort, but of a great power ; that what 
has been done is only a single manifesta- 
tion of the play of an inexhaustible force. 
There is somewhere in the universe an 
infinite fountain of life and beauty which 
overflows and floods all worlds with divine 
energy and loveliness. When the tide re- 
cedes it pauses but a moment, and then the 
music of its returning waves is heard along 
all shores, and its shining edges move 
irresistibly on until they have bathed the 
roots of the solitary flower on the highest 
Alp. 

It is this divine method of growth which 
Nature opposes to our mechanisms ; it is 
this inexhaustible life, overflowing in uncon- 
sciousness and boundless fulness, that she 
forever reveals. The truth which underlies 
48 




■ ' l^'''Mf^i^W<':^^^^utn^m^^^ 



i.''^^^l:i.'A■An'^ \.\ :'.''!',!} '^n LiXJy^lj, 




these two great facts needs no application 
y;^* to human life. Blessed, indeed, are they 
'/^ who live in it, and have .caught from it 
^W^ something of the joy, the health, and the 
^fh perennial beauty of Nature. 





<'v!^^V '^ nature, as in art, it 

is the sky which makes 

the landscape. Given 

^ ' the identical fields, 

\^,^ woods, and retreating 

hills, and every change 

of sky, every modulation of light, will 

produce a new landscape ; in light and 

atmosphere are concealed those mysteries 

•of colour, of distance, and of tone which 

clothe the changeless features of the visible 

world with infinite variety and charm. 

This fruitful marriage of the upper and 

the lower firmaments is perhaps the oldest 

fact known to men ; it was the earliest 

discovery of the first observer, it still is 

the most illusive and beautiful mystery in 

nature. The most ancient mythologies 

began with it, the latest books of science 

and natural observation are still dealing 

with it. Myths that are older than history 

50 

ft 



I. lU 






, , "< ^ ' ' 



■ '"..V'.'" 



^/.\ii>rj 



Y 



portray it in lofty symbolism or in splendid 
histories that embody the primitive ideals 
of divinity and humanity ; the latest poets 
and painters would fain touch their verse 
or their canvas with some luminous gleam 
from the heart of this perpetual miracle. 
The unbroken procession of the seasons 
changes month by month the relations of 
earth and sky ; day and night all the water- 
courses of the world rise in invisible moist- 
ure to a fellowship with the birds that 
have passed on swift wing above their 
currents; the great outlying seas, that 
sound the notes of their vast and passion- 
ate unrest upon the shores of every conti- 
nent, are continually drawn upward to 
swell the invisible upper ocean which, out 
of its mighty life, feeds every green and 
fruitful thing upon the bosom of the earth. 
This movement of the oceans upon the con- 
tinents through the illimitable channels of 
the sky is, in some ways, the most mysteri- 
ous and the most sublime of those miracles 
which each day testify to the presence and 
majesty of that Spirit behind Nature of 
51 



m 



' i^HM 



hwm 



■ ■ ■ wiUm. • ' 




whom the greatest of modern poets thought sk^itj^ 
when he wrote : 

Thus at the roaring loom of time I ply 

And weave for God the robe thou seest Him by. 



V Vi- 



The vast inland grain fields, that stretch 
in unbroken procession from horizon to 
horizon, have the seas at their roots not 
less truly than the fertile soil out of which 
they spring ; the verdure upon the moun- 
tain ranges, that keep unbroken solitude 
.% at the heart of the continents, speaks for- 
ever of the distant oceans which nourish 
i^> it, and spread it like a vesture over the 
barren heights. No traveller, deep in the 
recesses of the remotest inland, ever passes 
beyond the voice of that encircling ocean 
which never died out of the ears of the 
ancient Ulysses in the first Odyssey of 
wandering. 

Two months ago the apple trees were 
white with the foam of the upper sea; ■ 
to-day the roses have brought into my \ 

'SSM^fS II' ^'^^^^ P^^'-^ °^ garden the hues with which m 

sun and sea proclaimed their everlasting ^•< !'■-'- 
52 




t/. 



\\ I 



huw^: 



i#pS-^tr 









i^uj'ty!(iii^"U'^-^'<>-^yi/i'</i'>!'^i/<-{ viyU }U\' [/U'^ ''"(' 






W^^.'Mmmu^j'/m^»^'f\xMmmi 




marriag-e in the twilight of yester even, 
hi the deep, passionate heart of these splen- 
did flowers, fragrant since they bloomed 
in Sappho's hand centuries ago, this sub- 
lime wedlock is annually celebrated ; earth 
and sky meet and commiiigle in this mir- 
acle of colour and sweetness, and when 1 
carry this lovely flower into my study all 
the poets fall silent ; here is a depth of life, 
a radiant outcome from the heart of mys- 
teries, a hint of unimagined beauty, such 
as they have never brought to me in all 
their seeking. They have had their visions 
and made them music; they have caug-ht 
faint echoes of rushing- seas and falling 
tides ; the shadows of mountains have fallen 
upon them with low whisperings of un- 
speakable things hidden in the unexplored 
recesses of their solitudes; they have 
searched the limitless arch of heaven when 
it was sown with stars, and glittered like 
"an archangel full panoplied against a 
battle day;" but in all their quest the 
sublime unity of Nature, the fellowship of 
force with force, of sea with sky, of moist- 
53 









- - .V 



'/ -r/ 



.^■^'<H 



'WMmm^Xf{i^:s^M^MWM^ 






ure with light, of form with colour, has 
found at their hands no such transcendent 
demonstration as this fragile rose, which 
to-night brings from the great temple to ll^fp'^lfy/ , 

this little shrine the perfume and the royalty [.If^l] jifii/mllfi 
of obedience to the highest laws, and rever- 
ence for the divinest mysteries. Here sky 
and earth and sea meet in a union which 
no science can dissolve, because God has 
joined them together. Could 1 but pene- 
trate the mystery which lies at the heart 
of this fragile flower, 1 should possess the 
secret of the universe ; 1 should understand 
the ancient miracle which has battled wis- 
dom from the beginning and will not dis- 
cover itself to the end of time. 

If 1 permit my thought to rest upon this 
fragrant flower, to touch petal and stem 
and root, and unite them with the vast 
world in which, by a universal contribution 
of force, they have come to maturity, I 
find myself face to face with the oldest 
and the deepest questions men have ever 
sought to answer. Elements of earth and 
sea and sky are blended here in one of 
54 




'm 






!!ll!l/' 




Ml U( 



Ki 



those forms of radiant and vanishing beauty 
with which the unseen hfe of Nature crowns 
the years in endless and inexhaustible pro- 
fusion. As it budded and opened into full 
flower in the garden, how complete it 
seemed in itself, and how isolated from all 
other visible things ! But in reality how 
dependent it was, how entirely the creation 
of forces as far apart as earth and sky! 
The great tide from the Unseen cast it for 
a moment into my possession ; for an hour 
it has tilled a human home with its far- 
brought sweetness; to-morrow it will fall 
apart and return whence it came. As I 
look into its heart of passionate colour, 
the whole visible universe, that seems so 
fixed and stable, becomes immaterial, evan- 
escent, vanishing; it is no longer a per- 
manent order of seas and continents and 
rounded skies ; it is a vision painted by an 
unseen hand against a background of mys- 
tery. Dead, cold, unchangeable as 1 see 
it in the glimpses of a single hour, it be- 
comes warm, vital, forever changing as I 
gaze upon it from the outlook of the cen- . 



f m 



ij.\ h '- '^^ 



^^^^«f^0m4!ik 






\j^ ''I' 







turies. It is the momentary creation of 
forces that stream through it in endless 
ebb and flow, that are to-day touching the 
sky with elusive splendour, and to-morrow 
springing in changeful loveliness from the 
depths of earth. The continents are trans- 
formed into the seas that encircle them ; 
the seas rise into the skies that overarch 
them; the skies mingle with the earth, and 
send back from the uplifted faces of flowers 
greetings to the stars they have deserted. 
Mountains rise and sink in the sublime 
rhythm to which the movement of the 
universe is set ; that song without words 
still audible in the sacred hour when the 
morning stars announce the day, and 
the birds match their tiny melodies with 
the universal harmony. 

In the unbroken vision of the centuries 
all things are plastic and in motion ; a di- 
vine energy surges through all ; substantial 
for a moment here as a rock, fragile and 
vanishing there as a flower; but every- 
where the same, and always sweeping on- 
ward through its illimitable channel to its 
56 






"^ 



\ 



appointed end. It is this vital tide on 
which the universe gleams and floats like 
a mirage of immutability ; never the same 
for a single moment to the soul that con- 
templates it : a new creation each hour and 
to every eye that rests upon it. No dead 
mechanism moves the stars, or lifts the 
tides, or calls the flowers from their sleep ; 
truly this is the garment of Deity, and here 
is the awful splendour of the Perpetual 
Presence. It is the old story of the Greek 
Proteus translated into universal speech. 
It is the song of the Persian poet: 

The sullen mountain, and the bee that hums, 

A flying: joy, about its flowery base, 
Each from the same immediate fountain comes. 

And both compose one evanescent race. 

There is no difference in the texture fine 
That's woven tiirou.i;h oriranic rock and ffrass, 

And that which thrills man's heart in every line, 
As o'er its web God's weaving- fingers pass. 

The timid flower that decks the frag^rant field, 
The daring- star that tints the solemn dome, 

From one propulsive force to being- reeled; 
Both keep one law and have a sing;le home. 



57 




11 




mAi^ 




THE MYSTERY OF NIGHT 



VERY day two worlds 
lie at my door and in- 
vite me into mysteries 
as far apart as darkness 
and light. These two 
realms have nothing in 
common save a certain 
identity of form ; colour, relation, distance, 
are lost or utterly changed. In the vast 
fields of heaven a still more complete and 
sublime transformation is wrought. It is 
a new hemisphere which hangs above me, 
with countless fires lighting the awful high- 
ways of the universe, and guiding the 
daring and reverent thought as it falters 
in the highest empyrean. The mind that 
has come into fellowship with Nature is 
subtly moved and penetrated by the decline 
of light and the oncoming of darkness. 
As the sun is replaced by the stars, so is 
58 





ii,i5»^' 





the hot, restless, eager spirit of the day 
replaced by the infinite calm and peace of 
the night. The change does not come 
abruptly or with the suddenness of violent 
movement ; no dial is delicate enough to 
register the moment when day gives place 
to night. With that amplitude of power 
which accompanies every movement, with 
that sublime quietude of energy which per- 
vades every action, Nature calls the day 
across the hills and summons the night that 
has been waiting at the eastern gates. No 
stir, no strife, no noise of great activities, 
put forth on a vast scale, break the spell 
of an hour which is the daily witness of 
a miracle, and v/aits, hushed and silent, in 
a world-wide worship, while the altar fires 
blaze on the western hills. 

In that unspeakable splendour, earth and 
air and sea are for the moment one, and 
through them all there flashes a divine 
radiance ; time is not left without the wit- 
ness of its sanctity as it fades off the dials 
of earth and slips like a shining rivulet into 
the shoreless sea of light beyond. The 
59 

'•f\l. 







P. '■ 




I i 




I. I, ■ 



ii^r' 



tOi 



> i '' 




"S day that was born with seas and suns at 
c^ its cradle is followed to its grave by the 
long procession of the stars. And now 
that it has gone, with its numberless activi- 
ties, and the heat and stress of their con- 
tentions, how gently and irresistibly Nature 
summons her children back to herself, and 
touches the brow, hot with the fever of 
work, with the hand of peace ! An infinite 
silence broods over the fields and upon the 
restless bosom of the sea. Insensibly there 
steals into thought, spent and weary with 
many problems, a deep and sweet repose ; 
the soul does not sleep ; it returns to the 
ancient mother, and at her breast feels the 
old hopes revived, the old aspirations quick- 
ened, the old faiths relight their dying fires. 
The fever of agonising struggle yields to the 
calm of infinite trust ; the clouds fall apart 
and reveal the vision, that seemed lost, 
inviolate forever ; the brief, fierce, fruitless 
strife for self is succeeded by an unques- 
tioning trust in that universal good, above 
and beyond all thought, for which the uni- 
verse stands. Who shall despair while the 
60 



4> 



iife,,.,/., ,^ 



A A 



■^'^ 




:0 



fields of earth are sown with flowers and 
the fields of heaven blossom with stars ? 
The open heart knows, in a revelation 
which comes to it with every dawn and 
sunset, that life does not mock, its children 
when it holds this cup of peace to their 
anguished lips, and that into this tideless 
sea of rest and beauty every breathless and 
turbulent streamlet flows at last. 

In the silence of night how real and 
divine the universe becomes ! Doubt and 
unbelief retreat before the awful voices that 
were silenced by the din of the day, but 
now that the little world of man is hushed, 
seem to have blended all sounds into 
themselves. Beyond the circle of trees, 
through which a broken vision of stars 
comes and goes with the evening wind, the 
broad earth lies hushed and hidden. Along 
the familiar road a new and mysterious 
charm is spread like a net that entangles 
the feet of every traveller and keeps him 
loitering on where he would have passed 
in unobservant haste by day. The great 
elms murmur in low, inarticulate tones, and 
61 




^ ^I'.'/'^'VV'' 







1' J' 



'^ 



%Mi 



the shadows at their feet hide themselves 
from the moon, moving noiselessly through 
all the summer night. The woods in the 
distance stand motionless in the wealth of 
their massed foliage, keeping guard over 
the unbroken silence that reigns in all their 
branching aisles. Beyond the far-spreading 
waters lie white and dreamlike, and tempt 
the thought to the fairylands that sleep just 
beyond the line of the horizon. A sweet 
and restful mystery, like a bridal veil, hides 
the face of Nature, and he only can venture 
to lift it who has won the privilege by long 
and faithful devotion. 

If the night be starlit the shadows are 
denser, the outlook narrower, the mystery 
deeper; but what a vision overhangs the 
world and makes the night sublime with 
the poetry of God's thought visible to all 
eyes ! Who does not feel the passage of 
divine dreams over his troubled life when 
the infinite meadows of heaven are suddenly 
abloom with light ? On such a night im- 
mortality is written on earth and sky ; in 
the silence and darkness there is no hint of 
62 







"'A 









>^ ;>^v 



death ; a sweet and fragrant life seems to 
breathe its subtle, inaudible music through 
all things. In the depths of the woods one 
feels no loneliness ; no liquid note of her- 
mit thrush is needed to make that silence 
music. The harmony of universal move- 
ment, rounded by one thought, carried 
forward by one power, guided to one 
end, is there for those who will listen ; 
the mighty activities which feed the cen- 
tury-girded oak. from the invisible chambers 
of air and the secret places of the earth are 
so divinely adjusted to their work that one 
shall never detect their toil by any sound 
of struggle or by any sight of eiTort. 
Noiselessly, invisibly, the great world 
breathes new life into every part of its 
being, while the darkness curtains it from 
the fierce ardour of the day. 

In the night the fountains are open and 
flowing; a marvellous freshness touches 
leaf and flower and grass, and rebuilds 
their shattered loveliness. The stars look 
down from their inaccessible heights on a 
new creation, and as the procession of the 
63 








f 

A/ 







hours passes noiselessly on, it leaves behind 
a dewy fragrance which shall exhale before 
the rising sun, like a universal incense, 
making the portals of the morning sweet 
with prophecies of the flowers which are 
yet to bloom, and the birds whose song 
still sleeps with the hours it shall set to 
music. The unbroken repose of Nature, 
,^^ born not of idleness but of the perfect 

adjustment of immeasurable forces to their 
task, becomes more real and comprehen- 
sible when the darkness hides the infinitude 
">;."•■ *!•,, of details, and leaves only the great massive 

•'^^-\ ;*•:•.' effects for the eye to rest upon. While 

■^w'^•i.-K'?-'' rn^n sleep, the world sweeps silently onward 

*"^-v.. under the watchful stars, in a flight which 

makes no sound and leaves no trace. 

Through the deep shadows the mountains 

~' ---' — — loom in solitary and awful grandeur ; the 
wide seas send forth and recall their 
mighty tides ; the continents lie veiled in 
rolling mists ; the immeasurable universe 
glitters and burns to the farthest outskirts 
of space ; and yet, nestled amid this sublime 
activity, the little flower dreams of the day, 
64 





-,WJt; 









^^, 





and in its sleep is ministered to as perfectly 
as if it were the only created thing. 

When one stands on the shores of night 
and looks off on that mighty sea of dark- 
ness in which a world lies engulfed, there is 
no thought but worship and no speech but 
silence. Face to face with immensity and 
infinity, one travels in thought among the 
shining islands that rise up out of the 
fathomless shadows, and feels everywhere 
the stir of a life which knows no weariness 
and makes no sound, which pervades the: 
darkness no less than the light, and makes 
the night glorious as the day with its garni- 
ture of constellations ; and even as one waits, 
speechless and awestruck, the morning star 
touches the edges of the hills, and a new 
day breaks resplendent in the eastern sky. 



65 








•I? 



1 



ii 






'^lll 



/;','! 






'^v 



/^^ 



^ 




Chapter VIII 

OFF SHORE 

HO has not heard, 
amid the heat and 
din of cities, the 
voice of the sea 
striking" suddenly 
into the hush of 
thought its pene- 
trating note of mystery and longing? 
Then work and the fever w^hich goes with 
it vanished on the instant, and in the 
crowded street or in the narrow room there 
rose the vision of unbroken stretches of sky, 
■free winds, and the surge of the unresting 
waves. That invitation never loses its al- 
luring power ; no distance wastes its music, 
and no preoccupation silences its solicitation. 
It stirs the oldest memories, and awakens 
the most primitive instincts ; the long past 
speaks through it, and through it the buried 
generations snatch a momentary immor- 
tality. History that has left no record, 
66 






mini- 
mi 






im' 



'I'lnwi 



■^^^y^^- 



'n 













^'k^^ 



rich and varied human experiences that 
have no chronicle, rise out of the forget- 
fuhiess in which they are engulfed, and are 
puissant once more in the intense and irre- 
sistible longing with which the heart answers 
the call of the sea. Once more the blood 
flows with fuller pulse, the eye flashes with 
conscious freedom and power, the heart 
beats to the music of wind and wave, as 
in the days when the fathers of a long 
past spread sail and sought home, spoil, 
or change upon the trackless waste. Into 
every past the sea has sometime sounded 
its mighty note of joy or anguish, and 
deep in every memory there remains some 
vision of tossing waves that once broke on 
eyes long sealed. 

All day the free winds have filled the 
heavens, and flung here and there a hand- 
ful of foam upon the surface of the deep. 
No cloud has dimmed the splendour of a 
day which has filled the round heavens 
with soft music and touched the sea with 
strange and changeful beauty. It has been 
enough to wait and watch to forget self, 
67 






iA^ 



to escape the limitations of personality, and 
to become part of the movement, which, 
hour by hour, has passed through one 
marvellous change after another, until now 
it seems to pause under the sleepless vigi- 
lance of the stars. They look down from 
their immeasurable altitudes on the vast 
expanse of which only a miniature hemi- 
sphere stretches before me. How wide and 
fathomless seems the ocean, even from a 
single isolated point ! What infinite dis- 
tances are only half veiled by the distant 
horizon line ! What islands and continents 
and undiscovered worlds lie beyond that 
faint and ever receding circle where the 
sight pauses, while the thought travels 
unimpeded on its pathless way t There 
lies the untamed world which brooks no 
human control, and preserves the primeval 
solitude of the epochs before men came ; 
there are the elemental forces mingling 
and commingling in eternal fellowships and 
rivalries. There the winds sweep, and the 
storms marshal their shadows as on the 
first day ; there, too, the sunlight sleeps 
68 









^m^^.. Mf^^Pf 



'M^A'P,, 







on the summer sea as it slept in those for- 
gotten summers before a sail had ever 
whitened the blue, or a keel cut evanescent 
furrows in the trackless waste. 

Every hour has brought its change to 
make this day memorabh: ; hour by hour 
the lights have transformed the waters and 
hung over them a sky full of varied and 
changeful radiance. Across the line of the 
distant horizon white sails have come and 
gone in broken and mysterious procession, 
and the imagination has followed them far 
in their unknown journeyings. As silently 
as they passed from sight, all human 
history enacted in this vast province of 
Nature's empire has vanished, and left no 
trace of itself save here and there a bit of 
driftwood. There lies the unconquered 
and forever inviolate kingdom of forces 
over which no human skill will ever cast 
the net of conquest. 

The sea speaks to the imagination as no 

other aspect of the natural world does, 

because of its vastness, its immeasurable 

and overwhelming power, its exclusion 

69 



■iK-^.. 




^ 



.'L'^^f.y ^CHi^\ r^'i'-''^''- : 










'•''li-;''! 




-rjc'-ar ■ i-^^^ ., .> e m,'< 



from human history, its free, buoyant, 
changeful being. It stands for those 
strange and unfamiliar revelations with 
which Nature sometimes breaks in upon 
our easy relation with her, and brings back 
on the instant that sense of remoteness 
which one feels when in intimate fellow- 
ship a friend suddenly lifts the curtain 
from some great experience hitherto un- 
suspected. In the vast sweep of life 
through Nature there must always be 
aspects of awful strangeness; great realms 
of mystery will remain unexplored, and 
almost inaccessible to human thought; 
days will dawn at intervals in which those 
who love most and are nearest Nature will 
feel an impenetrable cloud over all things, 
and be suddenly smitten with a sense of 
weakness; the greatest of all her inter- 
preters are but children in knowledge of 
her mighty activities and forces. On the 
sea this sense of remoteness and strange- 
ness comes oftener than in the presence of 
any other natural form ; even the moun- 
tains make sheltered places for our thought 
70 





kill'..,. 



'*K 




! !■ 



4l\\^t 



at their feet, or along their precipitous 
ledges ; but the sea makes no concessions 
to our human weakness, and leaves the 
message which it intones with the voice 
of tempest and the roar of surge without 
an interpreter. Men have come to it in 
all ages, full of a passionate desire to catch 
its meaning and enter into its secret, but 
the thought of the boldest of them has 
only skirted its shores, and the vast sweep 
of untamed waters remains as on the first 
day. Homer has given us the song 
of the landlocked sea, but where has 
the ocean found a human voice that is 
not lost and forgotten when it speaks to 
us in its own penetrating tones ? The 
mountains stand revealed in more than 
one interpretation, touched by their own 
sublimity, but the sea remains silent in 
human speech, because no voice will 
ever be strong enough to match its awful 
monody. 

It is because the sea preserves its secret 
that it sways our imagination so royally, 
and holds us by an influence which never 




'I 

I 



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. 'j'l 



IV. '(^ 



.' I I J I II .■ /'I .' '1/ r' ^'. 




rt,WT6ii'vX"*« 



M'Si-'^'^'l^fi.fr'l??'^:' 



,,-,^.i>^., si'.V^-'^rf^ri'x '^■■' 




. M.' 1/u' r fi 



:i^'. 



^2''k>:£..3;ai . v^i ,.M.</,*^LiZ:a:- 






w 






?r/ 






looseius its grasp. Again and again we 
return to it, spent and worn, and it retills 
the cup of vitality ; there is life enough 
and to spare in its invisible and inexhaust- 
ible chambers to reclothe the continents 
with verdure, and recreate the shattered 
strength of man. Facing its unbroken 
solitudes the limitations of habit and 
thought become less obvious ; we escape 
the monotony of a routine, which blurs 
the senses and makes the spirit less sensi- 
tive to the universe about it. Life becomes 
free and plastic once more ; a deep con- 
sciousness of its inexhaustibleness comes 
over us and recreates hope, vigour, and 
imagination. Under the little bridges of 
habit and theory, which we have made for 
ourselves, how vast and fathomless the sea 
I of being is ! V\'hat undiscovered forces are 
there ; what unknown secrets of power ; 
what unsearchable possibilities of develop- 
ment and change ! How fresh and new 
becomes that which we thought outworn 
with use and touched with decay ! How 
boundless and untravelled that which we 

i_ ^ 








thought explored and sounded to its re- 
motest bound ! 

At nii;ht, when the vision of the waters 
grows indistinct, wiiat voices it has for our 
solitude! The "eternal note of sadness," 
to which all ages and racs have listened, 
and the faint echoes of which are heard in 
every literature, tills us with a longint; as 
vast as the sea and as vague. Infinity and 
eternity are not too great for the spirit 
when the spell of the sea is on it, and the 
voice of the sea tills it with uncreated 
music. 



\f/A 



li 



li I 



'/ 



1 , M 7' 



73 



■mr\ 



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J 



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att|( 






Chaplcr I\ 

A MOUNTAIN KIVIU.IT 

HIS iiKMiiiiii^ tlio ilav 
^. ! /J ,y^' bi(»kcMvilli ;i pioniiso t»f 
"" \, ^Jl\'i V siiltrv litMt which has Ivcii 

;l!/|' faithfully kc'pt. rho air was 
il/i'^ lilc'less, (he hirJs silt'iit ; Ilk' 
ti|jl' laiulscapo si-i-mcJ t(» shrink from 
the ardour t^l a i^a/e (hat piMk'tra(c\i to (he 
vtM\' roots ol" the trees, and covered itself 
with a taint ha/.e. All (hins^s stood hushed 
and motionless in a dream of heat ; even 
the harvest lields were deserted. On such 
a day Nature herself become svoiceless ; she 
seems to retreat into (hose deei"» and silen( 
chamlvis where (he sources of her lite are 
hidden alike from the heat and cold, from 
darkness and lii^ht. A straui^e and foie- 
bodins;' stillness is abroad in the earth, and 
one hides himself fron\ (he sun as from an 
enemy. 

In (his unna(ural hush (here was (Mie 
voice which made (he silence less ominous, 



74 









// Hi 



fAJ 




:^ -c^t.' ^v':.if,7;-r'-5 :-«r^"*<2-.- 



^jid' ' 



and ic'vivc'il liif siviit iiiiJ witlicrctl licsli- , 
ness ol till' spiril. '!<• lieu Ih.il voicL' "''' 
Si'cnu'd ((> mc this m(»iiiiiii' I he (nic loii- 
soi.ilidii wliiili Ilk- Jay ollcrcJ. II calli'ii 
iiif willi i<M)|, dc'licioiis loiu's lli.il S('i'nu'i.l 
aliiKiNl aiulibli', ami I hra^cJ llic ilcully 
heal as the traveller lilies his way over the 
desert to the oasis that pioniises a ilraiij^ht 
ol lile. As I |ta,sM\| ;iloii.i', the hioaj aisle 
ol the villai;i' slicci, anhcil by Ilie vciiei'- 
ahli' trees ol an oKli-r i;eiieralioii, I seemed 
lo W ill tireaiiilaikl ; no soiiiid broke the 
ii'posf (i| iiiiLldav, no loolslcp cihoed lar 
or near; the c.iltle stood motionless in the 
liekis heneatli the sheltering branehes. I 
turned into the iluly eiiiintiy road, and 
saw Ilk' vi'.ion ol Hie rreat encirclin,t; hills, 
remote, shailowless, ami dreamlike, a,L;ainst 
the white AiiiMisI sky. 1 sauntered slowly 
on, p.ni' in.i; here and llicii' at llie Innl df 
some stunly oak or wiile biamlied apple, 
until I reached the lillle stream that eomes 
rippling ilown liom the moiintain ,i(Ieii. 
A slioil walk across Hie liekis under the 
buiiiin^ snii biouidit me into the shallow 



"•'Ii, 




^ f #;x,v 



■,,uh)tmm 



w& 




l> :(\\\nX\\U, 





(>( llu' I rocs lli.il skirl (Ik- btnJcis ot tlic 
vvooJI.iikI. Ilk' brook loilcn-J Ivtwccii its 
,i;tc'(.'ii aiul slopiiii; h.iiiks ;iikl broke in liny 
billows oviT Ilk' siuoolli sloik'S (li;il l;i\' in 
i(s bc'J ; I ho sli.iJows i;ri'vv ik'iiscr as I 
advaiRwl, aiui a dcliiious coolness Iroin Ihc 
Jepllis of llu' woods louclk\l llic Sllltl\ vm 
alniospiu'ii'. A monk-iil laliT, and i slood 
williiii ilk' ,i;li'ii. ilk- woikl ol human 
aiiivily had vanished, shut out ol si,i;lil 
and souiul by the tiei'peuin^ lolia,i;e i»l the 
trees Ivhind me. ()veihead hardly a leaf 
stirred, but the branehini^ boui^hs spread 
a marvellous rool between the heavens aikl 
(he woodland paths, aiul sulTered only a 
stray llash ol lii^ht here and thi'ie to strike 
Ihrou^i^h. As I advanced slowly aloni; the 
well-worn path beside the brook, the ,^len 
,i;rew more and more narrow, the hillsides 
more ,ukl more precipitous. In the dusk\' 
lii;ht th.it silled d()wn through the ^i^reat 
frees 1 felt (he delicious relief of low tones 
alter the ,ulaie of the sununer daw It was 
another world into which 1 had conu' ; a 
world of unbroken repose and silence, a 




;"A,; 






1 '.-M- '' '-I'Ti 



Si;{^\ 



WdiKI (il swc'c'l .iiiil li.iLM.iiil iiirs i()(tlcHl l'\' 
llu' luoiiiil.iiii livtili'l .iiul sliifKlcil lt\' 
llu' intiiinl.tin Miiniiiils ,iiul llic .luliiiir, 
iiinhi.i,^'. 

I 111- palli v,iiii'<li(\l .il l.r.l .iikI iiolliiiir. 
iciii.iiiu'J hill llu- n.iiiow c'li.iiiiu-l ol llic 
biciiik ilscll, IJu' siiitMiJii ',|(iiu"- iii.ikiiir. .1 
prt'(.'.iii<»iis .iinl iiiufil.iiii Idoliiii^ lui llic /;|«-^|/i 
iklvciiliiroiis c'xpioic'i. I low sdolliiiii;; was vllu^«'^''^IASii 
lilt' tcasc'lcss pl.isli <>l lli.il lilllc sircam, 
hvlliiiv, ils m()ss-,i;i(>wii hanks aiul (.iashinjij 
ill iniiiialini' siiii;c' ai^aiiisl (he sloiics in i(s J Lv 
padi! VVIial iiiliiiilc \X'.\cc iciiMiccI in lliis 
pLut', aiuiiiul wliiih llic hiollu'i IkkhI ol 
ninnnlains had ,i;allu'icil, lo hold il inviolalc 1 Jii 
ai:aiiis( allcomers! 1 he i'UmI rocks were j f 
moss-covcrcil, I he sleep slopes on eilliei siJe Ih 
were lainlly lleckcJ with li,i;hl, anil one 
saw here aiul (here, (Iikmi^Ii (he ilnslereil fV^*] 
(innks o( dees, a ,i;leani ol hliic sky. 
Sonicdnics (he hrook naiiowcil (o a (iny 
slieain, inshiii^i; wilh iniivlnons cinrcnl ^ V>S!L'^' ' W • 




hclween (he rocky walls (ha( lorniecl lis |\ /, V^!' . ksiI 

channel; Ihen il '.pie.Kl onl shallow ami 1|i| :/,i l'|v' )/i^ 

noisy over some hio.ujer exp.mse ol while ||/ 

77 ■^' 



> 



mjrl^Au'nniiA^ui^l^lf 



(I 








■^mmt^iri'z'M^mnrri sv^^; 



sand and polished pebble ; then it loitered 
in the shadow of a great rock and became 
a deep, silent pool, full of shadows and the 
mysteries which lurk in such remote and 
dusky places. 

it was beside such a pool that 1 paused 
at last, and seated myself with intlnite 
content. Before me the glen narrowed 
into a rocky chasm, over which the ad- 
venturous trees that clung" to the precipitous 
hillsides spread a dense roof of foliage. 
The dark pool at my feet was full of 
mysterious shadows and seemed to cover 
epochs of buried history. As 1 studied its 
motionless surface the old medii^val legends 
of black, fathomless pools came back to 
me, and I felt the air of enchantment 
stealing over me, lulling my latter-day 
scepticism into sleep, and making all mys- 
teries rational and all marvels probable. 
In these silent depths no magical art had 
ever submerged cities or castles ; on the 
stillest of all quiet afternoons no muttled 
echoes, faint and far, float up through the 
waveless waters. But who knows what 




% 




4. m. 



But who knows what shadows have sunk into these sunless Ueptlis 



<" ' 



, ^- X ' — f^-'-'^'.fH^'^f 




shadows have sunk into these sunless 
depths ; what reflections of waving branches, 
what sittings of subdued light, what hushed 
echoes of the forgotten summers that per- 
ished here ages ago ? 

In such a place, at such an hour, one 
feels the most subtle and the most searching 
spell which Nature ever throws over those 
that seek her ; a spell woven of many 
charms, magical potions, and powerful 
incantations. The quiet of the place, awful 
with the unbroken silence of centuries ; the 
soft, half light, which conceals more than 
it discloses; the retreating trunks of trees 
interlacing their branches against invasion 
from light or heat or sound; the steep 
ravine, receding in darker and darker dis- 
tance, until it seems like one of the fabled 
passages to the under world: the wide, 
shadowy pool, into which no sunlight falls, 
and in which night itself seems to sleep 
under the very eyes of day — all these 
things speak a language which even the 
dullest must understand. As 1 sit musing, 
conscious of the darkest shadows and deep- 
79 
• "If" ■ - • ]/[•/[',!' .'/'"/''""fl'IfV;.* 





.fv 



Vi/ 



i:^^!^^ 



'^'/yRxW f-imc -^z/:^ 



■,'/■ ^ r f-f,*',^ 



,r . < -w<«-#^ iviy ^ 



est mysteries close at hand, and yet undis- 
turbed by them, I recall that one of the 
noblest poems on Death ever written was 
inspired in this place ; and 1 note without 
surprise, as its solemn lines come back to 
me, thai there is no honor in it, no ignoble 
fear, but awe and reverence and the sub- 
limity of a i^reat and hopeful thought, 
rhe organ music of those slow-moving 
verses seems like the very voice of a place 
out (A whicii all dread has gone from the 
thought of death, and where the brief span 
o\ life seems to arch the abyss of death 
with immortality. 



80 




Chapter X 

THE EARLIEST INSIGHTS 

HE he;ivc'ii wliicli lies 
about us ir, om infancy, 
like every other heaven of 
which men have dreamed, lies 
mainly within us; it is the 
» ,j I ' heaven of fresh instincts, of un- 
worn receptivity, of expandini,^ intellii^'-encc'. 
It is a heaven of faith and wonder, as every 
heaven must be ; it is a heaven of recur- 
ring miracle, of renewing freshness, of deep- 
ening interest, into such a heaven every 
child is born who brings into life that leaven 
of the imagination which later on is to 
penetrate the universe and make it one in 
the sublime order of truth and of beauty. 

As I write, the merry shouts of children 
come through the open window, and seem 
part of that universal soinid in which the 
stir of leaves, the faint, far song of birds, 
and the note of insect life are blended. 
When I came across the lield a kw mo- 
6 81 





AAW 






flush of joy on her face and the fadeless 
light of love in her eyes, came running with 
uneven pace to meet me. How slight and 
frail was that vision of childhood to the 
thought which saw the awful forces of 
Nature at work, or rather at play, about 
her ! And yet how serene was her look 
upon the great world dropping its fruit at 
her feet ; how familiar and at ease her 
attitude in the presence of these sublime 
mysteries ! She is at one with the hour 
and the scene ; she has not begun to think 
of herself as apart from the things which 
surround her; that strange and sudden 
sense of unreality which makes me at 
times an alien and a stranger in the presence 
of Nature, " moving about in world not 
realised," is still far off. For her the sun 
shines and the winds blow, the flowers 
bloom and the stars glisten, the trees hold 
out their protecting arms and the grass 
waves its soft garment, and she accepts 
them without a thought of what is behind 
82 





them or shall follow them ; the painful 
process of thought, which is first to separate 
her from Nature and then to reunite her to 
it in a higher and more spiritual fellowship, 
has hardly begun. She s+ill walks in the 
soft light of faith, and drinks in the im- 
mortal beauty, as the tlower at her side 
drinks in the dew and the light. It is she, 
after all, who is right as she plays, joyously 
and at home, on the ground which the 
earthquake may rock, and under the sky 
which storms will darken and rend. The 
far-brought instinct of childhood accepts 
without a question that great truth of unity 
and fellowship to which knowledge comes 
only after long and agonising quest. Be- 
tween the innocent sleep of childhood in 
the arms of Nature and the calm repose of 
the old man in the same enfolding strength 
there stretches the long, sleepless day of 
question, search, and suffering ; at the end 
the wisest returns to the goal from which 
he set out. 

To the little child, Nature is a succession 
of new and wonderful impressions. Com- 















Jolfc 



ing he knows not whence, he opens his 
eyes upon a world which is as new to him 
as is the virgin continent to the first dis- 
coverer, it matters not that countless eyes 
have already opened and closed on the 
same magical appearances, that numberless 
feet have trodden the same paths ; for him 
the morning star still shines on the first 
day, and the dew of the primeval night is 
still on the flowers. Day by day light and 
shadow fall in unbroken succession on the 
sensitive surface of his mind, and gradually 
an elementary order discovers itself in the 
regularity of these recurring impressions. 
Form, colour, distance, size, relativity of 
position are felt rather than seen, and the 
dim and confused mass of sensations dis- 
covers something trustworthy and stable 
behind. Nature is now simple appearance ; 
thought has not begun to inquire where the 
lantern is hidden which throws this wonder- 
ful picture on the clouds, nor who it is that 
shifts the scenes. Day and night alter- 
nately spread out a changeful succession of 
wonders simply that the young eyes may 
84 



'!'/;. 'Ill 







.'J^-'^kr^y^^ 





look, upon them ; and grass is green and 
sky blue that young feet may find soft 
resting-places and the young head a beauti- 
ful roof over it. Every day is a new dis- 
covery, and every night receives into its 
dreams some new object rrom the world 
of sights and sounds. 

Nature surrounds her child with invisible 
teachers, and makes even its play a training 
for the highest duties. Gradually, imper- 
ceptibly, she expands the vision and suffers 
here and there a hint of something deeper 
and more wonderful to stir and direct the 
young discoverer. He sees the apple tree 
let fall its blossoms, and, lo ! the fruit grows 
day by day to a mellow and enticing ripe- 
ness under his eyes. Suddenly he detects 
a hidden sequence between flower and fruit ! 

The rose bush is covered with buds, small, 
green, unsightly ; a night passes, and, be- 
hold ! great clusters of blossoming flowers 
that call him by their fragrance, and when 
he has come reward him with a miracle of 
colour. Here is another mystery ; and day 
by day they multiply and grow yet more 
85 



\y \i 




M iWi ii^/?i^ii \m i\'iUMlu 




wonderful. These varied and marvellous 
appearances are no longer detached and 
changeless to him ; they are alive, and 
they change moment by moment. Ah, the 
young feet have come now to the very 
threshold of the temple, and fortunate are 
they if there be one to guide them whose 
heart still speaks the language of childhood 
while her thought rests in the great truths 
which come with deep and earnest living. 
Childhood is defrauded of half its inheri- 
tance when no one swings wide before it the 
door into the fairyland of Nature ; a land 
in which the most beautiful dreams are 
like visions of the distant Alps, cloudlike, 
apparently evanescent, yet eternally true ; 
in which the commonest realities are more 
wonderful than visions. How many chil- 
dren live all their childhood in the very 
heart of this realm, and are never so much 
as told to look about them. The sublime 
miracle play is yearly performed in their 
sight, and they only hear it said that it is 
hot or cold, that the day is fair or dark ! 
And now there come sudden insights into 
86 










• C- LH- • ."' ' 




~w». 



m^^^mf^'- 






still larger and more awful truths ; a sense 
of wonder and awe makes the night solemn 
with mystery. Who does not recall some 
starlit night which suddenly, alone on a 
country road, perhaps, seemed to flash its 
splendour into his very soul and lift all life 
for a moment to a sublime height? The 
trees stood silent down the long road, no 
other footstep echoed far or near, one was 
alone with Nature and at one with her; 
suspecting no strange nearness of her pres- 
ence, no sudden revelation of her inner self, 
and yet in the very mood in which these 
were both possible and natural. The boy 
of Wordsworth's imagination would stand 
beneath the trees " when the earliest stars 
began to move along the edges of the 
hills," and, with fingers interwoven, blow 
mimic hootings to the owls: 

And they would shout 
Across the watery vale, and shout ai,Min, 
Responsive to his call — with quiverini,' peals, 
And lonj,^ halloos, and screams, and echoes loud. 
Redoubled and redoubled ; concourse wild 
Of mirth and jocund din. And when it chanced 
That pauses of deep silence mock'd his skill, 

87 




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Then, scmu'times, in that silence, while he hunj>: 
Listeninjj, u ,i;eMtie shock of mild surprise 
Has carried far into his iieart the voice 
Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene 
Would enter unawares into his mind 
With all its solemn ima.uery, its rocks, 
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received 
Into the bosom of the steady lake. 




It is in such moods as this, when all 
thing:s are forgotten, and heart and mind 
are open to every sigiit and sound, that 
Nature comes to the soul with some deep, 
sweet message of her inner being", and with 
invisible hand lifts the curtain of mystery 
for one hushed and tleeting moment. 

As 1 write, the memory of a summer 
afternoon long ago comes back to me. 
The old orchard sleeps in the dreamy air, 
the birds are silent, a tranquil spirit broods 
over the whole earth. Under the wide- 
spreading branches a boy is intently read- 
ing. He has fallen upon a bit of transcen- 
dental writing in a magazine, and for the 
irst time has learned that to some men the 
great silent world about him, that seems so 
real and changeless, is immaterial and un- 
88 




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substantial — ;i vision projected by the sou! 
upon illimitable space. On the instant all 
things are smitten with unreality ; the solid 
earth sinks beneath him, and leaves him 
solitary and awestruck in a universe that is 
a dream. He cannot understand, but he 
feels what Emerson meant when he said, 
" The Supreme Being does not build up 
Nature around us, but puts it forth through 
us, as the life of the tree puts forth new 
branches and leaves." That which was 
fixed, stable, cast in permanent forms for- 
ever, was suddenly annihilated by a revela- 
tion which spoke to (he heart rather than 
the intellect, and laid bare at a glance the 
unseen spiritual foundations upon which all 
things rest at last. From that moment the 
boy saw with other eyes, and lived hence- 
forth in things not made with hands. 

If we could but revive the consciousness 
of childhood, if we could but look out once 
more through its unclouded eyes, what 
divinity would sow the universe with light 
and make it radiant with fadeless visions of 
beauty and of truth ! 
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^V. 




Chapter XI 

THE HEART OF THE WOODS 

HERE are certain moods 
in which my feet turn, 
as by instinct, to the 
woods. I set out upon the wind- 
ing" road with a zest of anticipa- 
tion whose edge no repetition 
of the after-experience ever dulls ; 1 loiter 
at the shaded turn, watched often by the 
bright, quick eye of the squirrel peering 
over the old stone wall, and sometimes 
uttering a chattering protest against my 
invasion of his hereditary privacy. Here 
and there along the way of my familiar 
pilgrimage a great tree stands at the road- 
side and spreads its far-reaching shadow 
over the traveller ; and these are the places 
where 1 always throw myself on the ground 
and wait for the spirit of the hour and the 
scene to take possession of me. One needs 
preparation for the sanctities and solemnities 
of the woods, and in the slow progress 
90 



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which I always make hitherward the world 
slips away with the village that sinks be- 
hind the hill at the tirst turn and reminds 
me no longer by sight or sound that life 
is fretting its channels there and every- 
where with its world-old pathos and onward 
movement, caught on the sudden by un- 
seen currents and swept into wild eddies, 
or tlung over a precipice in a mist of tears. 
As 1 go on 1 feel a return of emotions 
which 1 am sure have their root in my 
earliest ancestry, a freshening of sense which 
tells me that 1 am nearing again those 
scenes which the unworn perceptions of 
primitive men first fronted. The conscious, 
self-directed intellectual movement within 
me seems somehow to cease, and some- 
thing deeper, older, fuller of mystery, takes 
its place; the instincts assert themselves, 
and 1 am dimly conscious of an elder world 
through which 1 once walked— and yet 
not I, but some one whose memory lies 
back of my memory, as the farthest, faint- 
est hills fade into infinity on the boundaries 
of the world. 1 am ready for the woods 
91 








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now, for I am escaping the limitations of 
my own personality, with its narrow ex- 
perience and its short memory, and 1 am 
entering into consciousness of a race life 
and dimly surveying the records of a race 
memory. 

At last the road turns abruptly from 
the hillside to which it clings with the 
loyalty of ancient association, and, running 
straight across a low-lying meadow, enters 
a deep wood, and vanishes from sight for 
many a mile. It is with a deep sigh of 
content that 1 find myself once more in 
that dim wonderland whose mysteries I 
would not fathom if I could. I am at one 
with the genius of the place ; 1 have es- 
caped customs, habits, conventions of every 
sort ; the false growths of civilisation have 
fallen away and left me in primitive strengi:h 
and freshness once more ; my own person- 
ality disappears, and I am breathing the 
universal life ; 1 have gone back to the far 
beginning of things, and I am once more 
in that dim, rich moment of primeval con- 
tact with Nature out of which all mythol- 
92 




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ogfies and literatures have grown, 
profound and all-embracing is the silence, 
and yet how full of inarticulate sound ! 
The faint whisperings of the leaves touch 
me first with a sense of melody, and then, 
later, with a sense of mystery. These are 
the most venerable voices to which men 
have ever listened ; and when I think of 
the immeasurable life that seems to be 
groping for utterance in them, 1 remember 
with no consciousness of scepticism that 
these are the voices which men once waited 
upon as oracles ; nay, rather, wait upon 
still ; for am I not now listening for the 
word which shall speak to me out of these 
shadowy depths and this mysterious an- 
tique life ? 1 am ready to listen and to 
follow if only these vagrant sounds shall 
blend into one clear note and declare to me 
that secret which they have kept so well 
through the centuries. I wait expectant, 
as 1 have waited so often before ; there is 
unbroken stillness, then a faint murmur 
slowly rising and spreading until 1 am sure 
that the moment of revelation has come, 
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then a slow recession back to silence. 1 
am not discouraged; sooner or later that 
multitudinous rustle of the wild woods will 
break into clear-voiced speech. 1 am sure, 
too, that some great movement of life is 
about to display itself before me. Is not 
this hush the sudden stillness of those whom 
1 have surprised and who have, on the 
instant, sprung to their coverts and are 
waiting impatiently until 1 have gone, to 
resume their interrupted frolic ! I have 
often watched and waited here before in 
vain, but surely to-day I shall beguile these 
hidden folk into revelation of that wonder- 
ful life they have suddenly suspended ! So 
I throw myself at the foot of a great pine, 
and wait ; the minutes move slowly across 
the unseen dial of the day, and I have be- 
come so still and motionless that 1 am part 
of this secluded world. The sun shines 
abroad, but I have forgotten it; there are 
clouds passing all day in their aerial jour- 
neyings, but they cast no shadow over 
me; even the flight of the hours is un- 
noticed. Eternity might come and 1 should 
94 




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be no wiser, I should see no change ; for 
does it not ah-eady hold these vast dim 
aisles and solitudes within its peaceful em- 
pire ? And is there not here the slow 
procession of birth, decay, and death, in 
that sublime order of growth which we call 
immortality ? 

I wait and watch, and I can wait forever 
if need be. Suddenly from the depths of 
the forest there comes a note of penetrating 
sweetness, wild, magical, ethereal ; 1 slowly 
raise myself and wait. Surely this is the 
signal, and in a moment I shall see the dim 
spaces between the trees peopled and ani- 
mate. There is a moment's pause, and then 
again that strange, mysterious song rings 
through the listening forest. It touches me 
like a sudden revelation ; I forget that for 
which I have waited ; 1 only know that the 
woods have found their voice, and that 
1 have fallen upon the sacred hour when 
the song is a prayer. Who shall describe 
that wild, strange music of the hermit- 
thrush ? Who will ever hear it in the 
depths of the forest without a sudden thrill 




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of joy and a sudden sense of pathos ? It 
is a note apart from the symphony to 
which the summer has moved across the 
tields and homes of men ; it has no kinship 
with those flooding, hquid melodies which 
poured from feathered throats through the 
long golden days ; there is a strain in it 
that was never caught under blue skies and 
in the safe nesting of the familiar tields; 
it is the voice of solitude suddenly break- 
ing into sound ; it is the speech of that 
other world so near our doors, and yet 
removed from us by uncounted centuries 
and unexplored experiences. 

The spell of silence has been broken, 
and 1 venture softly toward the hidden 
fountain from which this unworldly song 
has flowed ; but 1 am too slow and too 
late, and it remains to me a disembodied 
voice singing the "old, familiar things" of 
a past which becomes more and more dis- 
tinct as 1 linger in the shadows of this 
ancient place. As I walk slowly on, there 
grows upon me the sense of a life which 
for the most part makes no sound, and 
96 



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is all the deeper and richer because it is 
inarticulate. The very thought of speech 
or companionship jars upon me ; silence 
alone is possible for such hours and moods. 
The great movement of life which builds 
these mighty trunks and seiuls the vital 
currents to their highest branches, which al- 
ternately clothes and denudes them, makes 
no sound ; cycle after cycle have the com- 
pleted centuries made, and yet no sign of 
waning power here, no evidence of a fin- 
ished work! Here life first dawned upon 
men ; here, slowly, it discovered its mean- 
ing to them ; here the first impressions fell 
upon senses keen with desire for untried 
sensations ; here the first great thoughts, 
vast as the forest and as shadowy, moved 
slowly on toward conscious clearness in 
minds that were just beginning to think ; 
here and not elsewhere are the roots of 
those earliest conceptions of Nature and 
Life, which again and again have come 
to such glorious blossoming in the litera- 
tures of the race. This is, in a word, the 
world of primal instinct and impression ; 
7 97 




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and, therefore, forever the deepest, most 
familiar, and yet most marvellous world 
to which men may come in all their 
wanderings. 

As these thoughts come and go, un- 
clothed with words and unsought by will, 
1 grasp again the deep truth that the truest 
life is unconscious and almost voiceless ; 
that there is no rich, true, articulate life 
unless there flows under it a wide, deep 
current of unspoken, almost unconscious, 
thought and feeling ; that the best one ever 
says or does is as a few drops flung into 
the sunlight from a swift, hidden stream, 
and shining for a moment as they fall again 
into a current inaudible and invisible. The 
intellectual life that is all expressive, that 
is all conscious and self-directed, is but a 
shallow life at best ; he only lives deeply 
in the intellect whose thought begins in 
instinct, rises slowly through experience, 
■carrying with it into consciousness the 
noblest, truest one has felt and been, and 
finds speech at last by impulse and direc- 
tion of the same law which summons the 
98 



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seed from the soil and lifts it, growth by 
growth, to the beauty and the sweetness of 
the flower. Under the same law of un- 
conscious growth every true poem, every 
great work, of art, and every genuine noble 
character, has fashioned itself and come at 
last to conscious perfectness and recogni- 
tion. Genius is nearer Nature than talent ; 
it is only when it strays away from Nature, 
and loses itself in mere dexterities, that it 
degenerates into skill and becomes a tool 
with which to work, and not a gift from 
heaven. The silence of the deep woods 
is pregnant with mighty growths. Says 
Maurice de Guerin, true poet and lover of 
Nature : " An innumerable generation actu- 
ally hangs on the branches of all the trees, on 
the fibres of the most insignificant grasses, 
like babes on the mother's breast. All 
these germs, incalculable in their number 
and variety, are there suspended in their 
cradle between heaven and earth, and given 
over to the winds, whose charge it is to 
rock these beings. Unseen amid the living 
forests swing the forests of the future- 

LofC. 99 







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Nature is all absorbed in the vast cares of 
her maternity." 

But while 1 walk and meditate, letting 
the forest tell its story to my innermost 
thought, and recalling here only that which 
is most obvious and superficial (who is 
sufficient for the deeper things that lie like 
pearls in the depths of his being?), the 
light grows dimmer, and 1 know that the 
day has gone. I retrace my steps until 
through the clustered trunks of the trees 
I see once more the green meadows soft 
in the light of sunset. As 1 pass over the 
boundary line of the forest once more, 
faint and far the song of the thrush searches 
the wood, and, finding me, leaves its ethe- 
real note in my memory — a note wild as 
the forest, and thrilling into momentary 
consciousness 1 know not what forgotten 
ages of awe and wonder and worship. 



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% Chapter XII 

BESIDE THE RIVER 

LL day long the river 
has moved through my 
\p thought as it rolls through 
the landscape spread out 
at my feet. There it 
lies, winding for many a mile within the 
boundaries of this noble outlook ; by day 
flecked with sails approaching and reced- 
ing, and at night shining under the 
full moon like a girdle of silver, clasping 
mountains and broad meadow lands in a 
varied but harmonious landscape. From 
the point at which 1 look out upon its long 
course, the stream has a setting worthy of 
its volume and its history. In the distant 
! background a mountain range, of noble 
■ altitude and outline, has to-day an ethereal 
, , strength and splendour; a slight haze has 
-ffei^/l,iyl ,<!;i/i'/f/y/)/jl obliterated all details, and left the great 
hills soft and dreamlike in the September 
sunshine ; at first sight one waits to see 
101 






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them vanish, but they remain, wrought 
upon by sunHght and atmosphere, until the 
twiHght touches them with purple and night 
turns them into mighty shadows. On 
either hand, in the middle ground of the 
picture, long' lines of hills shut the river 
within a world of its own, and shelter the 
green meadows, the fallow tields, and the 
stretches of woodland that cover the broad 
sweep from the river's edge to their own 
bases. Below me the quiet current enters 
the heart of another group of mountains, 
flowing silently between the precipitous and 
rocky heights that lift themselves on either 
hand, indifferent alike to the frowning 
summits when the sun warms them with 
smiles, and to the black and portentous 
shadows which they often cast across the 
channel at their feet. The solitude and awe 
which belong to mountain passes through 
which great rivers tlow clothe this place 
with solemnity and majesty as with a visible 
garment, and till one with a sense of inde- 
scribable awe. 
The river which lies before me moves 
102 




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throug^h a mist of legend and tradition as 
well as though a landscape of substantial 
history. It has been called an epical river 
because of the varied and sustained beauty 
through which it sweeps from its mountain 
sources to the sea ; but as I turn from it, 
and the visible loveliness of its banks fades 
from sight, I recall that other landscape of 
history and legend through which it rolls, 
and that, for the moment, is the reality, 
and the other the shadow. A web of 
human associations spreads itself over this 
long valley like a richer atmosphere ; the 
fields are ripe with action and achievement ; 
every projecting point has its story, every 
gentle curve and quiet inlet its memory ; 
for many and many a decade of years life 
has touched this silent stream and human- 
ised its power and beauty until it has be- 
come part of the vast human experience 
wrought out between these mountain bound- 
aries. As 1 think of these things and of 
the world of dear past things which they 
recall, another great river sweeps into the 
vision of memory, but how difTerent 1 
103 

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There comes with it no warmth of human 
emotion, but only the breath of the un- 
broken woods, the awful aspect of the 
great precipitous cliffs, the vast solitude out 
of which it rolls, with troubled current, to 
mingle its mysterious waters with the north- 
ern gulf. It is a stream which Nature still 
keeps for herself, and suffers no division 
of ownership with men ; a stream as wild 
and solitary as the remote and unpeopled 
land through which it moves. This river, 
on the other hand, bears every hour the 
wealth of a great inland commerce upon 
its wide current ; it flows past cities and 
villages scattered thickly along its course, 
past countless homes whose lights weave a 
shining net along its banks at night ; on 
still Sabbath mornings the bells answer each 
other in almost unbroken peal along its 
course. Emerging from an unknown past 
in the earliest days of discovery, human 
interests have steadily multiplied along its 
shores, and spread over it the countless 
lines of human activity. To-day the Argo, 
multiplied a thousand times, seeks the 
104 



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golden fleece of commerce at every point 
along its shores ; and of the countless Jasons 
who make the voyage few return empty- 
handed. Hour after hour the white sails 
fly in mysterious and changing lines, mes- 
sengers of wealth and trade and pleasure, 
whose voyages are no sooner ended than 
they begin again. It is this wealth of 
action and achievement which makes the 
names of great rivers sonorous as the 
voices of the centuries; the Nile, the 
Danube, the Rhine, the Hudson — how 
weighty are these words with associations 
old as history and deep as the human 
heart. 

The rivers are the great channels through 
which the ceaseless interchange of the 
elements goes on ; they unite the heart of 
the continents and the solitary places of the 
mountains with the universal sea which 
washes all shores and beats its melancholy 
refrain at either pole. Into their currents 
the hills and uplands pour their streams ; 
to them the little rivulets come laughing 
and singing down from their sources in the 
105 




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forest depths. A drop falling from a pas- 
sing shower into the lake of Delolo may he 
carried eastward, through the Zambesi, to 
the Indian Ocean, or westward, along the 
transcontinental course of the Congo, to 
the Atlantic. The mists that rise from 
great streams, separated by vast stretches 
of territory, commingle in the upper air, 
and are carried by vagrant winds to the 
wheat-fields of the far Northwest or the 
rice-fields of the South. The ocean cease- 
lessly makes the circuit of the globe, and 
summons its tributaries along all shores to 
itself. But it gives even more lavishly than 
it receives ; day and night there rise over 
its vast expanse those invisible clouds of 
moisture which diffuse themselves through 
the atmosphere, and descend at last upon 
the earth to pour, sooner or later, into the 
rivers, and be returned whence they came. 
This subtle commerce, universal throughout 
the whole domain of nature, animate and 
inanimate, tells us a common truth with 
the rose, and corrects the false report of 
the senses that all things are fixed and 
106 




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isolated. It discloses a communion of 
matter with matter, a fellowship of conti- 
nent with continent, an interchange of 
forces which throws a broad light on things 
still deeper and more marvellous. It affirms 
the unity of all created things and predicts 
the dawn of a new thought of the kinship 
of races ; there is in it the prophecy of 
new insights into the universal life of men, 
of fellowships that shall rise to the recogni- 
tion of new duties, and of a well-being 
which shall bind the weakest to the strong- 
est, the poorest to the richest, the lowest 
to the highest, by the golden bond of a 
diviner love. 



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AT THE SPRING 

\yf ^ HE path across the fields 
■} a# is so well worn that one 
can find his way along its 
devious course by night almost 
as easily as by day. I have gone 
over it at all hours, and have 
never returned without some fresh and 
cheering memory for other and less fa- 
voured days. The fields across which it 
leads one, with the unfailing suggestion of 
something better beyond, are undulating 
and dotted here and there with browsing 
cattle. The landscape is full of pastoral 
repose and charm — the charm of familiar 
things that are touched with old memories, 
and upon whose natural beauty there rests 
the reflected light of days that have become 
idyllic. No one can walk along a country 
road over which as a boy he heard the 
daily invitation of the schoolhouse bell 
without discovering at every turn some 
108 



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loveliness never revealed save to the glance 
of unforgotten youth. The path which 
leads to the spring has this unfailing charm 
for me, and for many who have long 
ceased to follow its winding course. At 
this season it is touched here and there by 
the autumnal splendour, and fairly riots in 
the profusion of the golden-rod, whose 
yellow plumes are lighting the retreating 
steps of summer across the fields. Great 
masses of brilliant woodbine cover the stone 
walls and hang from the trees along the 
fences. The corn, cut and stacked in 
orderly lines, is not without its transform- 
ing touch of colour ; and while the trees 
still wait for the coronation of the year 
Nature seems to have passed along this 
path and turned it into a royal highway. 
As it approaches the woods, one gets 
glimpses of the village spires in the distance, 
and finds a new charm in this borderland 
between sunlight and shadow, between soli- 
tude and the companionship of human life. 
A little distance along the edges of the 
woods, with an occasional detour of the 
109 



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path into the shades of the forest, brings 
one to the spring. A great, rudely-cut 
stone marks the place, and makes a kind 
of background for the cool, limpid pool, 
into which a few leaves fall from the 
woods, but which belongs to the open sky 
and fields. There is certainly no. more 
gentle, reposeful scene than this; so se- 
cluded from the dust and whirl of cities 
and thoroughfares, and yet so near to 
ancient homes, so sweet and life-giving in 
its service to them, so often and so eagerly 
sought at all seasons and by men of all 
conditions. Here oftenest come the rest- 
less feet of children, and their shouts are 
almost the only sounds that ever break this 
solitude. 

To me there is something inexpressibly 
sweet and refreshing in the familiar and 
yet unfailing loveliness of this place. The 
fields are always peaceful, and the slow 
motions of the cattle grouped here and 
there under the shadows of solitary trees, 
or of the sheep browsing in long, irregular 
lines across the further meadows, give the 
110 









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landscape that touch of pastoral life which 
unites us with Nature in the oldest and 
most homelike relations. Here, on still 
summer afternoons, one seems to have 
come upon a sleeping world ; a world over 
whose slumber the clouds are passing like 
peaceful dreams. In such an hour the 
limpid water of the spring seems to rise 
out of the very heart of the earth, and to 
bring with it an unfailing refreshment of 
spirit. The white sand through which it 
finds its way makes its transparent clearness 
more apparent, and the great stone seems 
to hold back the woods from an approach 
that would overshadow it. It rises so 
silently into the visible world from the 
unseen depths that one cannot but feel 
some illusion of sentiment thrown over it, 
some disclosure of truth escaping with it 
from the darkness beneath. Whence does 
it flow, and what has its journey been } 
Did some remote mountain range gather 
its waters from the clouds and send them 
down through long and winding channels 
deep in its heart .? Is there far below an 





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invisible stream flowing:, like the river 
Alphaeus, unseen and unheard beneath the 
earth? The spring is mute when these 
questions rise to lips which it is always 
ready to moisten from its cool depths. It 
is enough that in this quiet place the bounty 
of Nature never ceases to overflow, and that 
here she holds out the cup of refreshment 
with royal indifference to gratitude or 
neglect. Here she ministers to every comer 
as if her whole life were a service. One 
forgets that behind this cup of cold water, 
held out to the humblest, there sweep 
sublime powers, and that the same hand 
which serves him here moves in their 
courses the planets, whose faint reflections 
shine in this silent pool by night. 

Springs have been natural centres of life 
from the earliest times. Deep in the soli- 
tude of forests, or fringed with foliage in 
the heart of deserts, they have alike served 
the needs and appealed to the sentiment of 
men. Around the wells cluster the most 
venerable associations of the ancient patri- 
archal families; the beautiful pastoral life 
112 




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of the Old Testament, full of deep, un- n' 
written poetry, discovers no scenes more 
characteristic and touching than those which 
were enacted beside these sources of fer- 
tility. Green and fruitful in the memory 
of the most sacred history repose these 
cool, refreshing pools Uiider the burning 
glance of the tropical sun. Here, too, as 
in those distant lands, life is kept in con- 
stant freshness around the borders of the 
spring. The grass grows green and dense 
here the whole summer through, and here 
there is always a breath of cooler air when 
the fields grow with intense heat. In such 
places Nature waits to touch the fevered 
spirit with something of her own peace, 
and to keep alive forever in the hearts of . 
men that faith in things unseen which rises 
like a spring from the depths, and makes 
a centre of fruitful and beautiful life. 




11^ 





'0 



Chapter XIV || 



ON THE HEIGHTS 







Tf6'''' it is to reveal with a clearness denied to 

'"^///■'j : - other hours. There came such a day not 

Cth^,/^ long ago to me ; a day of tonic atmosphere 

'-'v' — clear, cloudless, inspiring; there was no 

audible invitation in the air, but I knew 

by some instinct that the day and the 

'""^.^ mountains were parts of one complete 



l^^^V^ 



.ATURE creates days \^<^} 
for special insights 
and outlooks — days 
whose distinctive 
qualities make them part 
' of the universal revelation of the 
year. There are days for the deep woods, 
and for the open fields ; days for the 
beach, and for the inland river; days for 
. ..,. , solitary musing beside some secluded rivu- 

,;' . ' ' \ let, and days for the companionship and 
h; ' I movement of the highways. Each day is 

III K '1 

1^/ fitted by some subtle magic of adaptation 

to the place and the aspect of nature which 




-y /C^^^ 










whole. The morning- itself was a new 
birth of nature, full of promise and proph- 
ecy ; one of those hours in which only the 
greatest and noblest things are credible, in 
which one rejects unfaith and doubt and 
all lesser and meaner things as dreams of 
a night from which there has come an 
eternal awakening ; a day such as Emerson 
had in thought when he wrote : " The 
scholar must look long for the right hour 
for Plato's Tima^us. At last the elect 
morning arrives, the early dawn — a few 
lights conspicuous in the heaven, as of a 
world just created and still becoming — 
and in its wide leisure we dare open that 
book. There are days when the great are 
near us, when there is no frown on their 
brow, no condescension even; when they 
take us by the hand, and we share their 
thought." When such a morning dawns, 
one demands, by right of his own nature, 
the pilotage of great thoughts to some 
height whence the whole world will lie 
before him ; one knows by unclouded in- 
sight that life is greater than 





•|>J#^;^I^'.„. 





and that he is heir, not only of the cen- 
turies, hut of eternity. 

Such days belong to the mountains ; and 
when I opened my window on this morn- 
ing, I was in no doubt as to the invitation 
held forth by earth and sky. There was 
exhilaration in the very thought of the 
long climb, and at an early hour 1 was 
fast leaving the village behind me. The 
road skirted the base of the mountain, and 
struck at once into the heart of the wilder- 
ness, which the clustering peaks have pre- 
served from any but the most fleeting 
associations with the peopled world around. 
A barrier of ancient silence and solitude 
soon separated me even in thought from 
the familiar scenes I had left. A virginal 
beauty rested upon the road, and sank 
deep into my own heart as I passed along; 
to be silent and open-minded was enough 
to bring one into fellowship with the hour 
and the scene. The clear, bracing air, 
the rustling of leaves slowly sifting down 
through the lower branches, the solemn 
quietude, filled the morning with a deep 
116 




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joy that touched the very sources of life, 
and made them sweet in every thought and 
emotion. It was Hke a new beginning in 
the old, old story of time ; the stains of 
ancient wrong, the blights of sorrow, the 
wrecks of hope, were gone ; sweet with 
the untrodden freshness of a new day lay 
the earth, and looked up to the heavens 
with a gaze as pure and calm as their own. 
Somehow all life seemed sublimated in that 
golden sunshine ; the grosser elements had 
vanished, the material had become the 
transparent medium of the spiritual, the 
discords had blended into harmony, and 
one would have heard without surprise 
the faint, far song of the stars. The whole 
world was one vast articulate poem, and 
human life added its own strain of pene- 
trating sweetness. At last, after all these 
years of struggle and failure, one was 
really living ! 

The road, slowly ascending the long 

wooded slope, wound its way through the 

forest until it brought me to the mountain 

path which climbs, with many a halt and 

117 



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pause, to the very summit. Dense foliage 
overshadows it, a little thinner now that 
the hand of autumn has begun to dis- 
robe the trees. Great rocks often lie in 
the course of the path and send it in a 
narrow curve around them. Sometimes 
one comes upon a bold ascent up the face 
of a projecting cliff ; sometimes one plunges 
into the very heart of the shadows as they 
gather over the rocky channel of the brook 
that later will run foaming down to the 
valley. Step by step one widens his hori- 
zon, although it is only at intervals that 
he is able to note his progress upward. At 
the base of the mountain one saw only a 
circle of hills, and the long sweep of v/ooded 
slopes which converge in the valley ; grad- 
ually the horizon widens as one climbs 
beyond the summit lines of the lower hills ; 
at turns in the path, where it crosses some 
rocky declivity, one looks out upon a land- 
scape into which some new feature enters 
with every new outlook ; one range of hills 
after another sinks below the level of vision, 
and discloses another strip of undiscovered 
118 




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country beyond ; and so one climbs, step 
by step, into the glory of a new world. 

The solitude, the silence, the radiant 
beauty of the morning, the expanding 
sweep of hills and valleys at one's feet, 
fill one with eager longing for the unbroken 
circle of sky at the summit, and prepare 
one for the thrill of joy with which the 
soul answers the outspread vision. 

At last only a few rocks interpose be- 
tween the summit and the last resting- 
place. I wait a moment longer than I 
need, as one pushes back for an instant the 
cup from which he has long desired to 
drink. I even shun the noble vistas that 
open on either side, postponing to the 
moment of perfect achievement the partial 
successes already won. But the rocks are 
soon climbed, the summit is reached ! The 
world is at my feet — the mountain ranges 
like great billows, and the valleys, deep, far, 
and shadowy, between ; and overhead the 
unbroken arch of sky melting into illimi- 
table space through intlnite gradations of 
blue. The vision which has haunted me so 
119 



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long with illusive hints of range and splen- 
dour is mine at last, and I have no greeting 
for it hut the breathless eagerness with 
which 1 turn from point to point, as if to 
drink all in with one compelling glance. 
But the landscape does not yield its infi- 
nite variety to the first nor to the second 
glance ; the agitation of the first outlook 
gives place to a deep, calm joy ; the eager 
desire to possess on the instant what has 
been won by long toil and patience is fol- 
lowed by a quiet mood which banishes 
all thought of self, and waits upon the 
hour and the scene for the revelation they 
will make in their own good time. Slowly 
the noble landscape reveals itself to me in its 
vast range and its marvellous variety. The 
sombre groups of mountains to the west 
become distinct and majestic as I look into 
their deep recesses ; far otf to the north the 
massive bulk and impressive outlines of a 
solitary peak grow upon me until it seems 
to dominate the whole country-side. A 
kingly mountain truly, of whose " night of 
pines " our saintly poet has sung ; from 
120 




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this distance a vast and softened shadow 
against the stainless sky. To the east one 
sees the long uplands, with slender spires 
rising here and there from clustered homes ; 
to the south, a vast stretch of fertile fields, 
rolling like a fruitful sea to the horizon ; 
within the mighty circle, groups of lower 
hills, wooded valleys shadowy and mysteri- 
ous in the distance, villages and scattered 
homes. 

It was a deep saying of Goethe's that 
"on every height there lies repose." A 
Sabbath stillness and solemnity reign in 
this upper sphere, where the sound of 
human toil never comes and the cry of 
humanity never penetrates. The boundaries 
that confine and baffle the vision along the 
walks of ordinary life have all faded out ; 
great States lie together in this outlook 
without visible lines of division or separa- 
tion. The obstacles to sight which hourly 
baffle and confuse are gone ; from horizon 
to horizon all things are clear and visible, 
and the world is vast and beautiful to its 
remotest boundaries. The repose which 
121 





iTv, 



lies on the heights of life is horn of the vast 
and unclouded vision which looks down 
upon all obstacles, over all barriers, and 
takes in at a glance the mighty scope of 
human activity and the unbroken sky 
which overhangs it continually like a visible 
infinity. On such heights it is the blessed 
reward of a few elect souls to live ; but the 
paths thither are open to every traveller. 




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Chapt 

UNDER COLLEGE ELMS 





TRETCHED under the 
-.^ ^:/ spreading branches 
kv^' of this noble ehn, 
which has seen so 
many college genera- 
tions come and go, 
I have well-nigh forgotten that life 
has any limitations of space or time ; 
work, anxiety, weariness fade out of 
thought under a heaven from which 
every cloud has vanished, and the eye 
pierces everywhere the infinite depths of 
the upper firmament. Days are not always 
radiant here, and the stream of life as it 
flows through this tranquil valley is flecked 
with shadows ; but all sweet influences have 
combined to touch this passing hour with 
unspeakable peace. Here are the old 
familiar footpaths trodden so often with 
hurrying feet in other years ; here are the 
well-worn seats about which familiar groups 
123 



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have so often gathered and sent the echoes 
of their songs tlying heavenward ; here are 
the rooms which will never lose the sense 
of home because of those who have lived in 
them. The chapel bell tolls as of old, and 
the crowd comes hurrying along" like the 
generations before them, but the eye sees 
no familiar faces among them. It is a 
place of intense and rich living, and yet 
to-day, and for me, it is a place of memory. 
The life once lived here is as truly finished 
as if eternity had placed the impassable 
gulf between it and this quiet hour. These 
are the shores through which the river once 
passed, these the green fields which encir- 
cled it, these the mountains which flung 
their shadows over it, but the river itself 
has swept leagues onward. 

Mr. Higginson has written charmingly 
about " An Old Latin Text-Book," and 
there is surely something magical in the 
power with which these well-worn volumes 
la}' their spell upon us, and carry us back 
to other scenes and men. I have a copy of 
Virgil from which all manner of old-time 
124 




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I 



things slip out as I open its pages. The 
eager enthusiasm of the first dawning 
appreciation of tlie undying beauty of the 
old poet, faintly discerned in the language 
which embalms it, comes back like a whiff 
of fragrance from some by-gone summer. 
The potency of college memories lies in the 
fact that in those years we made the most 
memorable discoveries of our lives ; the un- 
known river may widen and deepen be- 
yond our thought, but the most noteworthy 
moment in all our wanderings with it will 
always be the moment when we first came 
upon it, and there dawned upon us the 
sense of something new and great. To 
most bo}'S this rich and never-to-be-forgot- 
ten experience comes in college. Except in 
cases of rare good fortune, a boy is not 
ripe for the literary spirit in the classic 
literature until the college atmosphere sur- 
rounds him. To many it never discovers 
itself at all, and the languages which were 
dead at the beginning of study are dead at 
the end ; but to those in whom the instinct 
of scholarship is developed there comes a 
125 




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li^ii 



f 



day when Virgil lives as truly as he lived 
in Dante's imagination, and, like Boccaccio, 
they light a fire at his tomb which years do 
not quench. 

Who that has ever gone through the 
experience will forget the hour when he 
discovered the Greeks in Homer's pages, 
and felt for the first time the grand impulse 
of that noble race stir his blood and till his 
brain with the far-reaching aspiration for a 
life as rich as theirs in beauty, freedom, and 
strength ! It is told of an English scholar 
that he devoted his winters to the " Iliad " 
and his summers to the " Odyssey," read- 
ing each several times every year. One 
could hardly reconcile such self-indulgence 
with the claims of to-day on every man's 
time and strength ; but I have no doubt all 
Grecians have a secret envy for such a 
career. The Old-World charm of the 
" Odyssey " is one of the priceless posses- 
sions of every fresh student, and to feel it 
for the first time is like discovering the sea 
anew. It is, indeed, the Epic of the Sea; 
the only poem in all literature which gives 
126 




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K.\\\ 



the breadth, the movement, the mighty 
sweep of sky belted with stars, the unspeak- 
able splendours of sunrise and sunset, — 
the grand, free life of the sea. I would 
place the " Odyssey " in every collection of 
modern books for the tonic quality that is 
in it. The dash of wave and the roar of 
wind play havoc with our melancholy, and 
fill us with shame that we have so much as 
asked the question, " Is Life Worth 
Living? " 

There is no grander entrance gate to the 
great world of thought than the Greek 
Literature. Universities are broadening 
their courses to meet the multiplied de- 
mands of modern knowledge and to fit 
men for the varied pursuits of modern life, 
but for those who desire familiarity with 
human life in its broadest expression, and 
especially for those who seek familiarity 
with the literary spirit and mastery of the 
literary art, Greek must hold its place in 
the curriculum to the end of time. This 
implies no disparagement of our own litera- 
ture — a literature which spreads its dome 
127 



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over a wider world of feeling and knowl- 
'^mm.'M ^^S^ ^h'^" the Greek ever saw within the 
horizon of his experience ; but the Greek, 
like the Hebrew, will remain to the latest 
generation among the great teachers of 
men. He was born into the first rank 
among nations ; he had an eye quick to 
see, a mind clear, open, and bold to grasp 
facts, set them in order, and generalise 
their law ; an instinct for art that turned all 
his observation and thinking into literature. 
Whether he looked at the world about him 
or fixed his gaze upon his own nature, his 
insight was from the very beginning so 
direct, so commanding, so perfectly allied 
with beauty, that his speculations became 
philosophy and his emotions poetry. There 
was hardly any aspect of life which he did 
not see, no question which he did not ask, 
and few which he failed to answer with 
more or less of truth. He walked through 
an untrodden world of sights and sounds, 
and reproduced the vast circle of his life in 
a literature to which men will look as long 
as the world stands for models of sweetness, 
128 



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beauty, and power. Greek literature holds 
its place, not because scholars have com- 
bined to keep alive its traditions and make 
familiarity with it the bond of the fellow- 
ship of culture, but because it is the faithful 
reflection of the life of a race who faced the 
world on all sides with masterly intelligence 
and power. It is a liberal education to have 
travelled from yEschylus, with his almost 
Asiatic splendour of imagination, to The- 
ocritus, under whose exquisite touch the 
soft outlines of Sicilian life took on idyllic 
loveliness ! 

And then there were those unbroken 
winter evenings, when one began really 
to know the great modern masters of litera- 
ture. What would one not give to have 
them back again, with their undisturbed 
hours ending only when the fire or the 
lamp gave out ! Those were nights of 
royal fellowships, of introduction into the 
noblest society the world has ever known, 
and it is the recollection of this companion- 
ship which gives those days under college 
roofs a unique and perennial charm. Then 
9 129 




ft! 





first the spirit of our own race was revealed 
to us in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton ; 
then first we thrilled to that music which 
has never faltered since Caedmon found his 
voice in answer to the heavenly vision. 
There are days which will always have a 
place by themselves in our memory, nights 
whose stars have never set, because they 
brought us face to face with some great 
soul, and struck into life in an instant some 
new and mighty meaning. The ferment of 
soul which Hazlitt describes on the night 
when he walked home from his first talk 
with Coleridge is no exceptional experience ; 
it comes to most young men who are sus- 
ceptible to the influence of great thoughts 
coming for the first time into consciousness. 
A lonely country road comes into view as 
I write these words, and over it the heavens 
bend with a new and marvellous splendour, 
because the boy who walked along its wind- 
ing course had just finished for the first 
time, and in a perfect tumult of soul, 
Schiller's " Robbers ; " it was the power of 
a great master, felt through his crudest 
130 




V.,., 





h. 



work, that filled the night with such magi- 
cal influences. 

The hours in which we come in contact 
with great souls are always memorable in 
our history, often the crises in our intellect- 
ual life ; it is the recollection of such hours 
that gives those bending elms an imperish- 
able charm, and lends to this landscape 
a deathless interest. 




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Chapter XVI 

fcCa^'^ A SUMMER MORNING 




DO not understand how 
any one who has watched 
the breaking of a summer 
day can question the 
noblest faiths of man. Wil- 
Ham Blake, with that integrity 
of insight which is often the possession of 
the true mystic, declared that when he was 
asked if he saw anything more in a sunset 
than a round disk of tire, he could only 
answer that he saw an innumerable com- 
pany of the heavenly host crying " Holy, 
Holy, Holy Lord God Almighty ! " The 
birth of a day is a diviner miracle even 
than its death. They were true poets who 
wrote the old Vedic hymns and sang those 
wonderful adorations when the last stars 
were fading in the splendour of the dawn. 
Beside the glory of the sun's announcement 
all royal progresses are tawdry and mean ; 
beside the beauty of the dawn, slowly un- 
132 




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veiling the day while the heavens wait in 
silent worship, all poetry is idle and empty. 
It is the divinest ot all the visible processes 
of Nature, and the sublimest of all her 
marvellous symbolism. 

On such a morning as this, twelve years 
ago, Amiel wrote in his diary : " The whole 
atmosphere has a luminous serenity, a lim- 
pid clearness. The islands are like swans 
swimming in a golden stream. Peace, 
splendour, boundless space ! . . . I long to 
catch the wild bird, happiness, and tame it. 
These mornings impress me indescribably. 
They intoxicate me, they carry me away. 
1 feel beguiled out of myself, dissolved in 
sunbeams, breezes, perfumes, and sudden 
impulses of joy. And yet all the time I 
pine for I know not what intangible Eden." 
In these few words this master of poetic 
meditation suggests without expressing the 
indescribable impression which a summer 
carries into every sensitive nature. 

Last night the world was sorrowful, 
worn, and dulled ; but lo ! the new day has 
but touched it and all the invisible choirs 
133 




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are heard again ; the old hope returns Hke 
a tide, and out of the unseen depths a new- 
life breaks soundless upon the unseen shores 
and sends its hidden currents into every 
dried and empty channel and pool. The 
worn old world has been created anew, and 
God has spoken again the word out of 
which all living things grow. In the silence 
and peace and freshness of this morning 
hour one feels the inspiration of Nature as a 
direct and personal gift; the inbreathing, 
which has renewed the beauty and fertility 
about him, renews his spirit also. He re- 
sponds to the fresh and invigorating atmo- 
sphere with a soul sensitive with sudden 
return of zest to every beautiful sight and 
sound. No longer an alien in this world 
which has never known human care and 
regret, he enters by right of citizenship into 
all its privileges of unwatched freedom and 
unclouded serenity. One is not absorbed 
by the glory of the morning, but set free 
by it. There are times when Nature per- 
mits no rivalry ; she claims every thought 
and gives herself to us only as we give our- 
134 






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selves to her 

complete possession of our souls. Not so, 
however, does she usurp the throne of our 
own personal life in those early hours when 
the sun, the master artist, whose touch has 
coloured every leaf and tinted every flower, 
demands her adoration. Then it is, per- 
haps, that she turns her thoughts from all 
lesser companionships and, wrapped in uni- 
versal worship, suffers us to pass and repass 
as unnoticed as the idlers in the cathedral 
by those who kneel at the chancel rail, 

I confess I never find myself quite un- 
moved in this sacred hour, announced only 
by the stars veiling their faces and the birds 
breaking the silence with their tumultuous 
song. The universal faith becomes mine 
also, and from the common worship I am 
not debarred. My thought rises whither the 
mists, parted from the unseen censers, are 
rising: 1 feel wlthni me the revival of 
aspirations and faiths that were fast over- 
clouding; the stir of old hopes is in my 
heart ; the thrill of old purposes is in my 
soul. Once more Nature is serving me in 
135 




She effaces us and takes 











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an hour of need ; serving me not by draw- 
ing me to herself, but by setting me free 
from a world that was beginning to master 
and make me its slave. 

Now all that insensibly growing servitude 
slips from me ; once more I am free and 
my own. The inexhaustible life that is 
behind all visible things, constantly flowing 
in upon us when we keep the channels 
open, recreates whatever was noblest and 
truest in me. With Nature, I believe ; and 
believing, 1 also share in the universal 
worship. 

Emerson somewhere says, writing about 
the most difficult of Plato's dialogues, that 
one must often wait long for the hour 
when one is strong enough to grapple with 
and master it, but sooner or later the fitting 
morning will come. It is the morning 
which gives us faith in the most arduous 
achievements, and invigorates us to under- 
take them. In the morning all things are 
possible because the heavens and the earth 
are so visibly united in the fellowship of 
common life ; the one pouring down a 
136 











measureless and penetrating tide of vitality, 
the other eagerly, worshipfully receptive. 
Nature has no more inspiring truth for us 
than this constant and complete enfolding 
of our life by a higher and vaster life, this 
unbroken play of a diviner purpose and 
force through us. Nothing is lost, nothing 
really dies ; all things are conserved by an 
energy which transforms, reorganises, and 
perpetuates in new and finer forms all vis- 
ible things. The silence of winter counter- 
feits the repose of death, but it is not even 
a pause of life; invisibly to us the great 
movement goes on in the earth under our 
feet. While we watch by our household 
fires, the unseen architects are planning the 
summer, and the sublime march of the 
stars is noiselessly bringing back the bloom 
and the perfume that seem to have van- 
ished forever. Every morning restores 
something we thought lost, recalls some 
charm that seemed to have escaped. 

In all noble natures there is an ineradi- 
cable idealism which constantly interprets 
life in its higher aspects. In the dusi 
137 









•^ 
^1/. 



of the road the mountains sometimes dis- 
appear from our vision, but we know that 
they still loom in undiminished majesty 
against the horizon; the gods sometimes 
hide themselves, but there is something 
within which affirms that we shall again 
look on their serene faces, calm amid our 
turbulence and unchanging amid our vicis- 
situdes. It is this heavenly inheritance of 
insight and faith which makes Nature so 
divinely significant to us, and matches 
all its forms and phenomena with spiritual 
realities not to be taken from us by time or 
change or by that mysterious angel of the 
last great transformation which we call 
death. The morning is always breaking 
over the low horizon lines of some sea 
or continent ; voices of birds are always 
" carolling against the gates of day ; " and 
so, through unbroken light and song, our 
life is solemnly and sublimely moved on- 
ward to the dawn in which all the faint 
stars of our hope shall melt into the 
eternal day. 











Chapter XVII 

A SUMMER NOON 

HE stir of the morning has 
given place to a silence 
broken only by the shrill 
whir of the locust. The distant 
shore lines that ran clear and 
white against the low back- 
ground of green have become dim and in- 
distinct ; all things are touched by a soft 
haze which changes the sentiment of the 
landscape from movement to repose, from 
swift and multitudinous activity to the hush 
of sleep. The intense blue of the morning 
sky is dimmed and the great masses of 
trees are motionless. The distant harvest 
fields where the rhythmic lines of the 
mowers have moved alert and harmonious 
through the morning hours are deserted. 
On earth silence and rest, and in the great 
arch of the sky a sea of light so full and 
splendid that it seems almost to dim the 
fiery effluence of the sun itself. In such 
an hour one stretches himself under the, 
139 












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trees, and in a moment the spell is on him, 
and he cares neither to think nor act ; he 
rejoices to lose himself in the universal 
repose with which Nature refreshes herself. 
The heat of the day is at its height, but for 
an hour the burden slips from the shoulders 
of care, and the rest comes in which the 
gains of work are garnered. 

The whir of the locust high overhead, 
by some earlier association, always recalls 
that matchless singer, some of whose notes 
Nature has never regained in all these later 
years. The whir of the cicada and the 
white light on the remote country road are 
real to us to-day, though one went silent 
and the other faded out of Sicilian skies 
two thousand years and more ago, because 
both are preserved in the verse of Theoc- 
ritus. The poet was something more than 
a mere observer of Nature, and the beauti- 
ful repose of his art more than the native 
grace and ease of one to whom life meant 
nothing more strenuous than a dream of 
a blue sea and fair sky. He had known 
the din of the crowded street as well as the 
140 






'And strayed about noiselessly with sub- 
dued and lovelv mien." 








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silence of the country road, the forms and 
shows of a royal court as well as the sim- 
plicity and sincerity of tangled vines and 
gnarled olives on the hillside. He had seen, 
with those eyes which overlooked nothing, 
the pomps and vanities of power, the fret 
and fever of ambition, the impotence and 
barrenness of much of that activity in 
which multitudes of men spend their lives 
under the delusion that mere stir and bustle 
mean progress and achievement. Out of 
Syracuse, with its petty court about a petty 
tyrant, Theocritus had come back to the 
sea and the sky and the hardy pastoral life 
with a joy which touches some of his 
lines with penetrating tenderness. Better a 
thousand times for him and for us the 
long, tranquil days under the pine and the 
olive than a great position under Hiero's 
hand and the weary intrigue and activity 
which made the melancholy semblance of 
a successful life for men less wise and gen- 
uine. The lines which the hand of Theoc- 
ritus has left on the past are few and 
marvellously delicate, but they seem to 
141 



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gain distinctness from the remorseless years 
that have almost obliterated the features 
of the age in which he lived. It is better 
to see clearly one or two things in life than 
to move confused and blinded in the dust 
of an impotent activity ; it is better to hear ' 
one or two notes sung in the overshadow- 
ing trees than to spend one's years amid 
a murmur in which nothing is distinctly 
audible. Theocritus, shunning courts and | 
cities, sought to assuage the pain of life i 
at the heart of Nature, and did not seek , 
in vain. He gave himself calmly and sin- I 
cerely to the sweet and natural life which I 
surrounded him, and in his tranquil self- ' 
surrender he gained, unsuspecting, the im- , 
mortality denied his eager and restless 
cotemporaries. Life is so vast, so unspeak-- 
ably rich, that to have reported accurately 
one swift glimpse, or to have preserved the 
melody of one rarely heard note, is to 
have mastered a part of the secret of the 
immortals. 

Struggle and anguish have their place in 
every genuine life, but they are the stages 
142 




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through which it advances to a streng^th 
which is full of repose. The bursting of 
the calyx announces the flower ; but the 
beauty of the perfect blossoming obliterated 
the very memory of its earlier growth. 
The climb upward is often a long anguish, 
but the dust and weariness are forgotten 
when once the eye rests on the vast outlook. 
A j^/^;,| " On every height their lies repose " is the 
''' ' " sublime declaration of one who had looked 

into most things deeper than his fellows, 
and had learned much of the profounder 
processes of life. Emerson long ago noted 
that even in action the forms of the Greek 
heroes are always in repose ; the crudity 
of passion, the distorting agony of half- 
mastered purpose, are lost in a self-forget- 
fulness which borrows from Olympus 
something of the repose of the gods. The 
sublime calm which imparts to great works 
of art a hint of eternity is born of complete 
mastery of life ; all the stages of evolution 
have been accomplished, the whole move- 
ment of growth has been fulfilled, before 
the hand of art sets the seal of perfection 



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on the thing that is done. Shadow and 
light, heat and cold, tempest and quiet 
days, have all wrought together before 
the blooming of the flower which in its 
perfect grace and beauty gives no hint of 
its troubled growth. As the consummation 
of all toil and struggle and anguish, there 
comes at last that deep repose, born not of 
idleness and indifference, but of the har- 
mony of all the elements in their last and 
finest form. 

In the unbroken silence of the noontide 
such thoughts come unbidden and almost 
unnoticed to one who surrenders himself 
to the hour and the scene. Nature has 
her tempests, but her harvests are gathered 
amid the calm of days that often seem 
filled with the peace of heaven, and the 
mighty and irresistible movement of her 
life goes on in unbroken silence. Tlie 
deepest thoughts are always tranquillising, 
the greatest minds are always full of calm, 
the richest lives have always at heart an 
unshaken repose. 








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Chapter XVIII 

EVENTIDE 

HEN the shadows 
lengthen and the 
landscape becomes 
indistinct, the com- 
mon life of men 
seems to touch the 
^^— ^ life of Nature most 
closely and sympathetically. The work of 
the day is accomplished ; the sense of things 
to be done loses its painful tension ; the 
mind, freed from the cares which engrossed 
it, opens unconsciously to the sights and 
sounds of the quiet hour. The fields are 
given over to silence and the gathering 
darkness ; the roads cease to be thorough- 
fares of toil ; and over all things the peace 
of night settles like an unspoken benedic- 
tion. To the most preoccupied there comes 
a consciousness that the world has changed, 
and that, while the old framework remains 
intact, a strange and transforming beauty 





has touched and spiritualised it. At even- 
tide one feels the soul of Nature as at no 
other hour. Her labours have ceased, her 
birds are silent ; she, too, rests, and in 
ceasing to do for us she gives us herself. 
One by one the silvery points of light 
break out of the darkness overhead, and 
the faithful stars look down on the little 
earth they have watched over these count- 
less years. The very names they bear 
recall the vanished races who waited for 
their appearing and counted them friends. 
Now that the lamps are lighted and the 
work of the day is done, is it strange that 
the venerable mother, whose lullabies have 
soothed so many generations into sleep, 
should herself appeal to us in some intimate 
and personal way ? 

With the fading out of shore and sea 
and forest line something deeper and more 
spiritual rises in the soul as the mists rise 
on the lowlands and over the surface of 
the waters. We surrender ourselves to it 
silently, reverently, and a change no less 
subtle and penetrating is wrought in us. 
146 

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Our personal ambitions, the sharply defined 
aims of our working hours, the very limi- 
tations of our individuality, are gone ; we 
lose ourselves in the larger life of which 
we are part. After the fret of the day we 
surrender ourselves to universal life as the 
bather, worn and spent, gives himself to 
the sea. There is no loss of personal force, 
but for an hour the individual activity is 
blended with the universal movement and 
the peace and quiet of infinity calm and 
restore the soul. Meditation comes with 
eventide as naturally as action with the 
morning; our soul opens to the soul of 
Nature, and we discover anew that we are 
one. In the noblest passage in Latin poetry 
Lucretius invokes the universal spirit of 
Nature, and identifies it with the creative 
force which impels the stars and summons 
the flowers to strew themselves in the path 
of the sun. There is nothing so refreshing, 
so reinvigorating, as fresh contact with the 
fountain whence all visible life flows, as a 
renewed sense of oneness with the mighty 
appearance of things in which we live. 
147 



.■.i:'V:t^ 














Now that all outlines are softened, all dis- 
tinctive features are lost, Nature loses its 
materialism, and becomes to our thought 
the vast, silent, unbroken flow of force 
which the later science has substituted for 
an earlier and cruder conception. And this 
invisible stream leads us back, as our 
thoughts unconsciously follow it, to One 
whose thought it is and whose mind shares 
with our mind something of the unsearch- 
able mystery of its purpose and nature. 

Some one has said that a man is great 
rather by reason of his unconscious thought 
than by reason of his deliberate and self- 
directed thinking. Released from medita- 
tion on definite and special themes, the 
thought of a great man instinctively returns 
to the mystery of life. No poet creates a 
Hamlet unless he has brooded long and 
almost unconsciously on the deeper things 
that make up the inner life ; such a figure, 
forever externalising the profounder and 
more obscure phases of being, is born of 
secret and habitual contact with the deepest 
experiences and the most fundamental 
148 



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problems. The mind of a Shakespeare 
must often, forsaking" the busy world of 
actuality, meditate in the twilight which 
seems to release the soul of things seen, 
and, veiling the actual, reveal the realities 
of existence. 

Revery becomes of the highest impor- 
tance when it substitutes for definite think- 
ing that deep and silent meditation in which 
alone the soul comes to know itself and 
pierces the wonderful movement of things 
about it to its source and principle. One 
of Amiel's magical phrases is that in which 
he describes revery as the Sunday of the 
soul. Toil over, care banished, the world 
forgotten, one communes with that which 
is eternal. In the long course of centuries 
the forests are as short-lived as the flowers ; 
all visible forms are but momentary ex- 
pressions of the creative force. In the work 
of the greatest mind all spoken and written 
thoughts are but partial and passing utter- 
ances of a life of whose volume and move- 
ment they afford only half-comprehended 
hints. After a Shakespeare has written 













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thirty immortal plays he must still feel that 
what was deepest in him is unuttered. 
There is that below all expression of life 
which remains forever unspoken and un- 
speakable ; it is ours, but we cannot share 
it with others ; we drop our plummets into 
its depths in vain. It is deeper than our 
thought, and it is only at rare moments, 
when we surrender ourselves to ourselves, 
that the sense of what it contains and 
means fills us with a sudden and overpower- 
ing consciousness of immortality. Out of 
this deeper life all great thoughts rise into 
consciousness, losing much by imprison- 
ment in any form of speech, but still bring- 
ing with them indubitable evidence of their 
more than royal birth. From time to time, 
like the elder race of prophets, they enter 
into our speech and renew the fading sense 
of the divinity of life, and so, through in- 
dividual souls, the deeper truths are retold 
from generation to generation. 

As one meditates in this evening hour, 
the darkness has gathered over the world 
and folded it out of sight. The few faint 
150 




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ijj i|1| li^ht. So in every human life the near and 
2^\ iw'^ 111' ^^^ familiar is overarched by infinity and 
U "^1 .m M eternity. 






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t^f| stars have become a shining- host, and the 
'j immeasurable heavens have substituted for 

the near and familiar beauty of the earth 
J their own sublime and awful commingling 

of unsearchable darkness and unquenchable 



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Chapt 

THE TURN OF THE TIDE 

OR days past there 
have been intangible 
hints of change in earth 
and air; the birds are silent, 
and the universal strident note 
of insect life makes more musical 
to memory the melodies of the 
earlier season. The sense of overflowing 
vitality which pervaded all things a few days 
ago, when the tide was at the flood, has 
gone ; the tide has turned, and already one 
movement of the ebb. 
Through all the vanished months of flower 
and song, one's thought has travelled fast 
upon the advancing march of summer, try- 
ing to keep pace with it as it pushed its 
fragrant conquest northward ; to-day there 
is a brief interval of pause before the same 
thought, following the sunshine, turns south 
again, and seeks the tropics. A little later 
152 



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the spell of an indescribable peace will rest 
upon the earth, but a peace that will be but 
a brief truce between elements soon to close 
in struggle again. To-day, however, one 
feels the repose of a tlnished work before 
the first mellow touch of decay has come. 
The full, rich foliage still shelters the paths 
upon which the leaves have not yet fallen ; 
the meadows are green ; the skies soft and 
benignant. The conquest of summer is 
still intact, but here and there one sees 
slight but unmistakable evidence that the 
garrison, under cover of night, is beginning 
its long retreat. In such a moment one 
feels a sudden sense of loneliness, as if a 
friend were secretly preparing to desert one 
to his foes. 

In this pause of the season one finds the 
subtle beauty and completeness of the 
summer growing upon him more and more. 
While the work was going forward, there 
was such profound interest in the process 
that one watched the turn and direction of 
the chisel rather than the surface of the 
marble slowly answering, line by line, the 
153 





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overmastering thought ; but now that the 
months of toil are past, and all the imple- 
ments of labour are cast aside, the finished 
work absorbs all thought and fills all im- 
aginations. So vast is it, and on such a 
scale of magnitude, that one hardly saw 
before the delicacy and exquisite adjust- 
ment of parts, the marvellous art that 
framed the smallest leaf and touched the 
vagrant wild flower still blooming on the 
edges of the woodland. It is, after all, when 
the great festival days are over and the 
thronging crowds have gone, that the true 
worshipper finds the temple beautiful with 
the highest visions of worship, and in the 
silence of deserted aisles and shrines sees 
with new wonder the workmanship of the 
Deity. For all such this is the most solemn 
of all the recurring Sabbaths of the year ; 
the hush at noonday and at even is itself an 
unspoken prayer. The moment of com- 
pletion in the history of any great work is 
always sacred. When the noise and dust 
of the working days are gone, the great 
illuminating thought shines out unobscured ; 
154 





and in the perception of this universal ele- 
ment, which on the instant wins recognition 
from every mind, the personal element 
vanishes; the mere skill of the workman 
is forgotten in the new revelation of soul 
which it has given the world. For the 
same reason Nature takes on in these few 
and peaceful days a spiritual aspect, and 
the most careless finds himself touched, 
perhaps saddened, he knows not how or 
why. 

Now again is the old mystery and deep 
secret of life forced upon thought : " Ex- 
cept a grain of wheat fall into the earth and 
die, it abideth by itself alone ; but if it die, 
it beareth much fruit." When the tide was 
at the flood it was enough to breathe the air 
and listen to the magical music of advanc- 
ing life ; but now, when the tide begins to 
recede and leave the vast shores bare and 
silent, one must think, whether he will or 
not. Nature, that was careless poet, flower- 
crowned and buoyant with the promise of 
eternal youth, turns teacher, and will not 
sutfer us to escape the deeper truths, the 
155 







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more searching and awful lessons. As the 
physical falls away the spiritual comes into 
clear and compelling distinctness. Who 
that goes abroad in these quiet days, and 
feels the subtle change from the grosser to 
the ethereal which pervades the very air, can 
escape the threefold thought of Life, Death, 
and Immortality ? 

The silence that has already fallen upon 
the jubilant voices of summer will extend and 
deepen day by day until even the thoughtless 
babbling of the brooks ceases and the hush 
becomes universal. The earth, that a little 
time ago was producing such an endless 
variety of forms of life and beauty, will 
give birth to a myriad thoughts, deep, 
spiritual, and far-reaching ; translating into 
the language of spirit the vast movement of 
the year, and completing its mysterious 
cycle with a vision of the sublime ends for 
which Nature stands, and to the consumma- 
tion of which all things are borne forward. 
And when the time is ripe there will 
come a transformation like the descent 
of the heavens upon the earth, flooding 
156 



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Ayi 







^i^. the dying world with unspeakable splen- 

" ^ ' ''' dours ; the sunset which closes the long 

c summer day and leaves through the night 

•jfl of winter the fadeless promise of another 




dawn. 



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Chapter XX 

A MEMORY OF SUMMER 

fjj' N the pine woods, or 
floating under overhang- 
k3^ . !"§■ branches on the 
jT- ""'' ' silent and almost motion- 
M less river, 1 have had visions 
of my study fire during the 
summer months, and, now that I find myself 
once more within the cheerful circle of its 
glow, the time that has passed since it was 
lighted for the last time in the spring seems 
like a long, delightful dream. I recall those 
charming days, some of them full of silence 
and repose from dawn to sunset, some of 
them ripe with eflfort and adventure, with a 
keen delight in the feeling of possession 
which comes with them ; they were brief, 
they have gone, but they are mine forever. 
The beauty and freshness that touched 
them morning after morning as the dew 
touches the flower are henceforth a part of 
my life ; they have entered into my soul as 
158 







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their light and heat entered into the ripening 
fruits and grains. I have come bacic to my 
friendly tire richer and wiser for my absence 
from its cheer and warmth ; my life has 
been renewed at those ancient sources 
whence all our knowledge has come ; I have 
felt again the solitude and sanctity of those 
venerable shades where the voices of the ora- 
cles were once heard, and fleeting glimpses 
of shy divinities made a momentary splen- 
dour in the dusky depths. 

Wordsworth's sonnets are always within 
reach of those who never get beyond the 
compelling voice of Nature, and who are 
continually returning to her with a sense of 
loss and decline after every wandering. As 
1 take up the little, well-worn book, it opens 
of itself at a familiar page, and I read once 
more that sonnet which comes to one at 
times with an unspeakable pathos in its 
lines — a sense of permanent alienation and 
loss: 

The world is too much with us; late and soon, 
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers ; 
Little we see in Nature that is ours ; 









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We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon. 

This sea that bares her bosom to the moon, 

The winds that will be howling at all hours, 

And are up-gathered now like springing flowers — 

For this, for everything, we are out of tune. 

It moves us not. Great God ! 1 'd rather be 

A pagan suckled in a creed outworn, 

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea. 

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; 

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, 

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. 

Almost unconsciously I repeat these lines 
aloud, and straightway the fire, breaking 
into flame where it has been only glowing 
before, answers them with a sudden out- 
burst of heat and light that make a brief 
summer in my study. When one goes 
back to the woods and streams after long 
separation and absorption in books and 
affairs, he misses something which once 
thrilled and inspired him. The meadows 
are unchanged, but the light that touched 
them illusively, but with a lasting and in- 
communicable beauty, is gone ; the wood- 
lands are dim and shadowy as of old, but 
they are vacant of the presence that once 
filled them. There is something painfully 
160 




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disheartening in coming back to Nature and 
finding- one's self thus unwelcomed and 
uncared for, and in the first moment of 
disappointment an unspoken accusation of 
change and coldness lies in the heart. The 
change is not in Nature, however ; it is in 
ourselves. " The world is too much with 
us." Not until its strife and tumult fade 
into distance and memory will those finer 
senses, dulled by contact with a meaner life, 
restore that which we have lost. After a 
little some such thought as this comes to 
us, and day after day we haunt the silent 
streams and the secret places of the forest ; 
waiting, watching, unconsciously bringing 
ourselves once more into harmony with the 
great, rich world around us, we forget the 
tumult out of which we have come, a deep 
peace possesses us, and in its unbroken 
quietness the old sights and sounds return 
again. Youth, faith, hope, and love spring 
again out of a soil which had begun to deny 
them sustenance ; old dreams mingle with 
our waking hours; the old-time channels 
of joy, long silent and bare, overflow with 
161 




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streams that restore a lost world of beauty 
in our souls. We have come back to 
Nature, and she has not denied us, in spite 
of our disloyalty. 

I know of nothing more full of deep 
delight than this return of the old compan- 
ionship, this restoration of the old intimacy. 
How much there is to recall, how many 
confidences there are to be exchanged ! 
The days are not long enough for all we 
would say and hear. Such hours come in 
the pine woods ; hours so full of the strange 
silence of the place, so unbroken by custom- 
ary habits and thoughts, that no dial could 
divide into fragments a day that was one 
long unbroken spell of wonder and delight. 
So remote seemed all human life that even 
memory turned from it and lost herself in 
silent meditation ; so vast and mysterious 
was the life of Nature that the past and 
the future seemed part of the changeless pres- 
ent. The light fell soft and dim through 
the thickly woven branches and among the 
densely clustered trunks; underneath, the 
deep masses of pine needles and the rich 

162 
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moss spread a carpet on which the heaviest 
footfall left the silence unbroken. It was a 
place of dreams and mysteries. 

Heed the old oracles, 

Ponder my spells; 
Song wakes in my pinnacles 

Wlien the wind swells. 
Soundeth the prophetic wind, 
The shadows shake on the roclc behind, 
And the countless leaves of the pine are strings 
Tuned to the lay the wood-god sings. 

Hearken ! hearken ! 
If thou wouldst know the mystic song 
Chanted when the sphere was young, 
Aloft, abroad, the pjean swells ; 
O wise man ! hear'st thou half it tells ? 

Sitting there, with the deep peace of the 
place sinking into the soul, the solitude was 
full of companionship; the very silence 
seemed to give Nature a tone more com- 
manding, an accent more thrilling. At 
intervals the gusts of wind reaching the 
borders of the wood filled the air with dis- 
tant murmurs which widened, deepened, 
approached, until they broke into a great 
wave of sound overhead, and then, receding, 
died in fainter and ever fainter sounds. There 
163 




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was something in this sudden and unfamiliar 
roar of the pines that hinted at its kinship 
with the roar of the sea ; hut it had a dif- 
ferent tone. Waste and trackless solitudes 
and death are in the roar of the sea ; re- 
moteness, untroubled centuries of silence, 
the strange alien memories of woodland 
life, are in the roar of the pines. The for- 
gotten ages of an immemorial past seem to 
have become audible in it, and to speak of 
things which had ceased to exist before 
human speech was born ; things which lie 
at the roots of instinct rather than within 
the recollection of thought. The pines only 
murmur, but the secret which they guard 
so well is mine as well as theirs ; I am no 
alien in this secluded world ; my citizenship 
is here no less than in that other world to 
which I shall return, but to which I shall 
never wholly belong. The most solitary 
moods of Nature are not incommunicable ; 
they may be shared by those who can for- 
get themselves and hold their minds open 
to the elusive but potent influences of the 
forest. He who can escape the prison of 
164 






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--.4' 



habit aud work and routine can say with 
Emerson : 

Wlien I am stretched beneath the pines, 
When the evening star so lioiy shines, 
I laugh at the lore and the pride of man. 
At the sophist schools and the learned clan ; 
For what are they all, in their high conceit, 
When man in the bush with God may meet ? 




165 





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